Guest blogger and 2026 British Council Venice Fellow Kialy Tihngang dives into their research relating to Blackness, queerness, and Britishness in film and moving image.

I am a Glasgow-based Cameroonian-British artist, primarily working in moving image, but also in sculpture, textiles, performance and writing. Research in various expanded forms has always been a part of my work, and last year I began a practice-based PhD at The University of Stirling’s Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory. My practice questions how identities are constructed, misremembered and reimagined, particularly in the context of the asymmetric relationship between Europe and West Africa. In my PhD specifically, I am looking at how artists’ moving image can be used to form a Cameroonian-British aesthetic, or ‘way of inhabiting space’* with a focus on rituals and returns.

In my films I build elaborate sets, costumes and props, collaborating with designers and performers to create immersive visual worlds. Within them, I question colonial narratives and explore Blackness, queerness, and Britishness. My work uses humour as a methodology, alongside critical fabulation** and Afropresentism***), to speak critically, but accessibly. It draws on the darkly idiosyncratic humour of Nollywood, the spellbinding arcs of high fantasy and speculative fiction, and the uncanniness of Western mass-media aesthetics, inviting viewers into conversations about memory, identity and structural absurdities.

Still from Neyinka and the Silver Gong, Kialy Tihngang (2024).

This summer I have the opportunity to live and work in Venice for a month as a British Council Venice Fellow. Alongside the responsibility of stewarding Lubaina Himid’s upcoming exhibition for the British Pavilion, the Fellows also undertake personal research projects. During my time in Venice, I will start research for a new artist film, with the working title Not My Miengu!. It will be a farcical exploration of the colonial splitting of Cameroon, my own Cameroonian-British heritage, and the transatlantic migratory journeys many African-descended people have historically made, and do contemporarily make. It will use mythology from the Jengu – mermaid-like water spirits venerated by Cameroon’s Sawa people – cult as a symbol of literal and cultural hybridity. The Jengu cult, an example of celebrating powerful Black African mermaid figures, contrasts violently with the racist backlash that Black actress Halle Bailey faced after she was cast as Ariel in Disney’s 2023 Little Mermaid remake. This (almost) laughable hostility towards a fictional and magical creature has its roots in the long histories of anti-Blackness that still shape society today.

At this stage, the film will follow the titular Miengu on a journey between Cameroon, Hollywood, and Paris, as she pursues fame, fortune, and love in a series of musical numbers inspired by Technicolor musicals – as deeply informed by Michelle Williams Gamaker’s artist films Thieves (2023) and Strange Evidence (2026), which have used her ‘fictional activism’ methodology to redress racist depictions of performers of colour in 20th century cinema. I am also informed by the first ever African movie musical, Med Hondo’s 1979 West Indies (a history-hopping examination of France’s colonial entanglement with the Caribbean), and Wael Shawky’s Drama 1882 (a filmed musical chronicling the events that led to Britain’s occupation of Egypt), which premiered at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Not My Miengu! will be an artist film and a movie musical, but most importantly, an alternative to imperialist narratives about Cameroon and its colonial intervenors. As nationalism hardens borders and identities, Not My Miengu! will use humour, fantasy, and beauty to push back against these tides. 

Headshot. Credit Kialy Tihngang.

This project feels particularly relevant to Venice, a city shaped by maritime lore, migration, and imperial entanglements, making it an ideal site for shared exploration and collaborative myth-making. During the Fellowship, I want my research process to be collaborative, connecting with other Fellows, practitioners across the Biennale, and members of the public from across the globe, to exchange stories, imagery, and cultural perspectives that might inform the film’s narrative and worldbuilding. It will be particularly exciting to bring this dialogue to Venice. I hope to build interdisciplinary dialogue and lasting networks spanning both Venice and the UK, nurturing a spirit of collective imagination that reflects the various histo-geographic mutations of worldwide mermaid myths.

*hooks, b. (1995) ‘An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional.’ Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry, 1, pp. 65-72.

**Hartman, S. (2008) ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, 12(2), pp. 1-14.

***Githere, N. and Tawe, E. (2022) ‘Neema Githere and Ethel Tawe’, BOMB, April 19, Art and Theory, pp. 42-49.

Find out more about the Venice Fellowships and the UK at the Venice Biennale here.

Michelle Williams Gamaker: Strange Evidence is at Offline in Glasgow from 5 June 2026, as part of Glasgow International 2026.

Kialy Tihngang is a Glasgow-based Cameroonian-British artist, and PhD researcher in Film and Media at the University of Stirling, working in moving image as well as sculpture, textiles, and writing. Her work uses Afro-presentism, the dark humour of Nollywood, and the visual language of Western mass media to explore Blackness, queerness, Britishness, and the absurd structural oppressions surrounding these personal themes. Kialy’s work has been featured at Glasgow International, Bloomberg New Contemporaries and London Short FIlm Festival. Recent solo shows include Out Of Office at Soup, London, Neyinka and the Silver Gong at Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, and Lean Six Sigma at Quench Gallery, Margate. Her 2024 film, Neyinka and the Silver Gong, was selected by Tramway, Glasgow, for Artists’ Film International 2025. You can find out more about Kialy’s work here.