Abiba Coulibaly will no longer be writing about herself in the third person. I am a London-based film programmer with a background in critical geography, whose work explores the intersection of ethics and aesthetics.

My curatorial practice examines the historic use, unfulfilled potential and inherent limitations of cinema’s role in fostering solidarity and liberation between communities, continents, and diasporas. This runs through recent projects including Black and Arab Encounters on Screen, a performance lecture, and Ambiguous Encounters: Pan-Africanism in the Post-Colonial City at the Barbican.

In 2022, I initiated the Magnum Photos Film Festival and joined the programming team for Open City Documentary Festival. After working across the Programming and Archival departments at the BFI I have conceived numerous film programmes in a freelance capacity in London (the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Barbican, Autograph ABP), as well as internationally at Ocean Space (Venice), HKW (Berlin), and Dakar (Yennenga Centre, Ciné Banlieue). I have facilitated the UK premiere of several radical and experimental documentaries from the African continent including Xaraasi Xanne (2022), Au cimetière de la pellicule (2023), Coconut Head Generation (2023), Fragments from Heaven (2022), Ballade aux sources (1965), Memories of an Unborn Sun (2024) and Les Plongeurs du désert (1952).

Alongside my work in cultural institutions, I maintain an independent, anti-establishment programming practice as the founder of Brixton Community Cinema and film cooperative Atlas Cinema, two ongoing experiments in what democratising access to cinema—as both a medium and space—could look like. Atlas Cinema also served as the inspiration for Atlas in Motion, a recipient of the British Council’s Connections Through Culture grant, which translated the project’s ethos into a new community-oriented film space in Bangkok, Thailand.

My film practice has continually integrated questions of spatial and civic equity. In 2023, Brixton Community Cinema was commissioned by the London Festival of Architecture to build and programme an out-door cinema, and in 2024–25 I co-led an Architectural Design Studio at the Royal College of Art, following my participation in the fourth cohort of New Architecture Writers.

My writing, which includes bylines for Equator Magazine, the Jarman Awards, Montez Press, Sight & Sound, Air Afrique and the Architectural Review, typically focuses on the geopolitical context of sites of cultural production and exhibition. As a moderator, I have hosted conversations with artists and filmmakers including Abderrahmane Sissako, Zineb Sedira, Meriem Bennani, Akinola Davies Jr., Onyeka Igwe, Basma al-Sharif, Imran Perretta and Kevin Jerome Everson.

contact: abiba.coulibaly@live.co.uk
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