For the month of March, Vtape is proud to present another work by an artist new to the Vtape catalogue: Mahlet Cuff.

why some people be mad at me sometimes (2024) is a single-channel experimental film that cites the mother of Dancehall, Sister Nancy, singing her song “Bam Bam“ in dialogue with Maya Angelou’s performance of the poem The Mask. A meditation on the misappropriation of Blackness within music, and how often Black folks are told to not criticize but to smile and be grateful. All while tracing the filmmaker’s relationship to Dancehall and Afro Caribbean culture through archival footage of themselves as a young person dancing at Folklorama. Folklorama has the intention to be a space for sharing diverse cultures, but is oftentimes a space of cultural consumption that erases the colonial history of the countries that are on display.

Mahlet Cuff (b.1998) is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, writer, filmmaker, film programmer, DJ, sound artist, community organizer and arts cultural worker based in Winnipeg, Manitoba (Treaty 1). Through an ethnographic-based practice, they are interested in themes of memory and erasure in order to make sense of the Black Queer diasporic communities they are a part of and engage with.

By using Black feminist citational praxis and interrogating their own personal familial archives, they create reimagined Black Queer Diasporic dance and music histories by visually and sonically collaging moving images and sound. Cuff’s work has been screened and exhibited in Winnipeg, Toronto, Windsor, New York, Paris and Brazil. Their video UTOPIA (an ode to the past, present and future) was shortlisted for the 2025 Fluxus Museum Prize for Experimental Video.

Image credit (home page): why some people be mad at me sometimes, by Mahlet Cuff (2024)