Kialy Tihngang

Neyinka and the Silver Gong(2024)
Kialy Tihngang
Selected by Tramway, Glasgow

Historical films like Braveheart paint a completely white, completely virtuous picture of precolonial Scotland. This is beautifully disrupted by the 9th century records of the fir gorma. The Old Irish term for Black people, ‘fir gorma’, directly translates as ‘blue men’. References to fir gorma in ancient Irish chronicles are thought by historians and folklorists to refer to North African people enslaved by Vikings in the 9th century and brought to Ireland and the Scottish Hebrides. As a Black English woman living in Scotland, I’m interested in how this displaced community might have constructed their own Scottish identity.

After speculating that some fir gorma escaped captivity, fled to an uncharted Scottish island, and formed a clan, my work has taken the form of an extended trailer for a fir gorma fantasy blockbuster. It atmospherically draws on the rousing, melodramatic, trailer for Braveheart and its depiction of blue-painted warriors, symbolically connecting the blue people to favourable traits of courage, honour, and chivalric romance. I’m interested in film trailers as analogies for nationalistic self-mythologising - cherrypicking the most enticing parts of a film, or a national history, to construct the most enticing self-image.

Using over-sentimental, absurdly jingoistic performance to camera, I hope to challenge the supposed newness of the Black presence in Scotland. By hypervisibly layering greenscreen and camcorder footage, revealing the construction of the trailer, I'm considering the artificially layered construction of national identity. This also references the jarring visual effects common in Nollywood, connecting the blue people to their contemporary African diaspora.

The video interrogates contemporary Scottish identity from a close, but not fully embodied perspective, contributing to wider discourse about the rise of nationalism in Western Europe. This is important in the context of Black Lives Matter when the art world must ask itself which histories it memorialises. This is especially true as we comfortably, warmly, safely witness countless colonialism-fuelled, genocidal atrocities in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and more, as our world leaders allow Black and brown bodies to pile up.