ALL ABOUT LOVE (2025)

We are excited to announce that the ‘All About Love’ project continues with a newly-commissioned artist film. Curator Zarina Rossheart invited artist duo Rohan Ayinde and Tayo Rapoport to create the project’s legacy piece – ęmí: freedomsong.

ęmí: freedomsong is an audio-visual piece inspired by bell hooks’ All About Love and Camille Sapara Barton’s Tending Grief. Reflecting on the Yoruba concept of ęmí {the breath that animates life} freedomsong invites audiences to connect with their voices and find the courage to speak out. 

At the heart of the work is a ritual led by Barton and singer-songwriter anaiis, in which six vocalists – anaiis, Tawiah, douniah, Bint Mbareh, Amina Gichinga, and Roxanne Tataei – were invited to release grief and transform it into love through song. Their voices form the sonic foundation of the film: a freedom song rising in defiance of silencing amid the genocide in Gaza and other ongoing dispossessions.

Filmed in black and white on 16mm, the studio recordings carry audiences across boundaries of time and place. The visual language invites us into a multigenerational dialogue on the power of freedom songs – songs that hold grief and, through love, make space for resistance, healing, and dreaming otherwise. Archival footage deepens this conversation, threading the present with past struggles for liberation against the backdrop of censorship and erasure of voices that challenge dominant narratives.

In dialogue with these songs, artists Helen Cammock, Asmaa Jama, Jasleen Kaur, Eve Stainton and Alberta Whittle express the urgency of reimagining freedom through centering an ethic of love, while Yewande YoYo Odunubi animates these ideas through movement, grounding the voice in the body’s breadth. 

Rooted in the history of revolutionary song, ęmí: freedomsong alchemizes grief into a shared language of love, protest, and possibility.

ęmí: freedomsong is commissioned by BUILDHOLLYWOOD and produced in partnership with Art Practice.

ęmí: freedomsong will premiere on the 16 – 19th October 2025 at 1-54 London, Somerset House in partnership with Nowness.

Image: film still from ęmí: freedomsong, courtesy of Rohan Ayinde and Tayo Rapoport, 2025. All About Love commission by BUILDHOLLYWOOD. Image features artist Yewande YoYo Odunubi. 

ALL ABOUT LOVE (2023)

‘All About Love’ is BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s first major curatorial and artist commission that took over large-format billboards across Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester between April – December 2023. Curated by Zarina Rossheart, the project invited artists Helen Cammock, Asmaa Jama, Jasleen Kaur, Grace Ndiritu, Eve Stainton and Alberta Whittle to respond to the bell hooks’ seminal text through the lens of their artistic practices.

The point of departure for the commission was the quote from All About Love:

‘Whether it is the ongoing worldwide presence of violence expressed by the persistence of the man-made war, hunger and starvation, the day-to-day reality of violence, the presence of life-threatening diseases that cause the unexpected deaths of friends, comrades, and loved ones, there is much that brings everyone to the brink of despair. Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into the sea of despair.’

In All About Love bell hooks offers us radical new ways to think about love. While considering our polarised, loveless and hyper consumerist society, hooks urges us to bring a new love ethic to every dimension of our lives. From politics, religion, the workplace, domestic households, to intimate relationships hooks offers us a bold new perspective. This project looks at hooks’ legacy and invites audiences to collectively reimagine our future.

‘All About Love’ is part of Your Space Or Mine, BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s ongoing initiative that gives artists and creatives a unique platform to bring their work to the streets of the UK.

Special thanks:
Dr. Linda Strong-Leek at bell hooks estate, Serena Stent and Lizzie Rowles at HarperCollins UK, Kate MacGarry at Kate MacGarry London, Will Lunn at Copperfield London, Catherine Wood and Emma Poulter at Tate, Ben Roberts at Brighton CCA, Carmen Julía and Niquita Munowenyu at Spike Island, Marina La Verghetta at Freize Studios, Helen Cole at In Between time, Aldo Rinaldi, Jeremy Deller.

‘All About Love’ website and teaser poster campaign is designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio.