Newcastle University’s MA Curating Art students present Her Many Names (Elsewhere). The exhibition brings together different ways of picturing female companionship, and journeys from the city to the country through presenting two different works.

Amaal Said’s film Open Country follows a Somali mother and daughter who set out from their London home on the Old Kent Road, travelling through Bexley and North Kent along a pilgrimage route. The daughter records an audio diary for her seriously ill grandmother in Somalia, using the journey to ease her mother’s anxiety and encourage her to look ahead. Filmed across Kent, including at William Morris’s ‘Red House’ in Bexley and the coast near Canterbury, the film delicately explores the emotional tension between presence and distance, care and hope, and longing for a homeland beyond the present moment.

Open Country is displayed alongside is a nineteenth-century drawing depicting the characters of Rosalind and Celia from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Disguised as men, the two women escape restrictive family structures in search of safety, freedom and autonomy. It’s unclear here whether the women show excitement at their freedom, exhaustion from their journey, or homesickness. Where Said’s film traces movement and migration, the drawing gestures toward both escape and return. In their new life, Rosalind and Celia find intimacy, mutual recognition and shared belonging. 

Both works frame the women’s journeys from city to country as personal transformations. Both explore the tension between being present in the here and now, and yearning for another place, or another time. In both artworks, the protagonists’ identities are reshaped through movement, memory and acts of care.

The exhibition is the result of a new relationship between Newcastle University and Film and Video Umbrella (FVU). 

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Open Country was commissioned for The Open Road by Film and Video Umbrella, Forma and Three Rivers. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.