An interview with Samra Mayanja
This resource entry records a conversation held around the presentation of Samra Mayanja: The Living and the Stale. It considers how the artist’s work brings together moving image, installation, memory and the experience of moving through a gallery.
The exhibition was organised as a dispersed film environment rather than a single-screen presentation. Images, sound and spatial relationships encouraged visitors to connect fragments and to consider how personal and shared histories can remain active within places.
A dispersed approach to film
Mayanja’s practice uses the conditions of exhibition-making as part of the work. The moving image becomes one element within a wider arrangement, allowing pacing, proximity and the architecture of the gallery to shape how the project is encountered.
In this context, the exhibition’s title points towards tensions between what is retained and what is allowed to change. The resource presents these themes as an interpretive summary rather than as a transcript of the original conversation.
Working through memory
The discussion also situated artistic research within everyday experience. Materials and images could carry overlapping associations, while the installation made room for uncertainty, repetition and connections that are not resolved into one fixed narrative.
This page preserves the subject and context of the conversation while avoiding extended source wording. It is intended as a concise record for readers researching the exhibition and the development of Mayanja’s practice.
