And she was
wearing trousers:
a call to our heroines

Jabu Nadia Newman

A Bedtime Story (2022)

This video is for Krotoa, made of fragments, memories, sentiments, and throw-aways. An ode and a question. I let my mind wander and drift around the imaginations and dreams of Krotoa. How would she view the world now? Exist in it. Wear a tie dye crop top and bleached jeans, and sport her natural hair in an up-do? What did she dream? Did she look up at the sky and tell herself stories of love and lovers? A kaleidoscope of moments lost between time and space.
In a black curtained room, is detail of a timber wood structure that displays a TV monitor playing a video, adjacent to a hanging transcript booklet, and below is a shelf with headphones.
I fantasised about being her. I imagined my text messages as hers. Voice notes from her besties. My camera roll full of pictures and videos she took. My days filled with her looking through my eyes. Out at the world and leaving her mark.
A dark room with a timber structure that is spot lit, and mounted on the structre is a TV monitor with headphones on the shelf below.
A dark room with a timber structure that is spot lit, and on its right side has a TV monitor mounted with headphones on the shelf below.

Single channel video with headphones. Duration: 04:44.

Installation views of A Bedtime Story at Arts House, 2022.


A young African woman with light complexion, is wearing a yellow headband with her dark hair tied back. She has brown eyes and is wearing a white t-shirt in a room that appears to have light from the run shining on her that is creating shadows on the wall behind her..

Jabu Nadia Newman is an award-winning artist and filmmaker who works through the mediums of photography and videography. Using an agenda of pushing intersectional feminism her work is largely based on the different and complex identities of South African women. Newman independently wrote and directed South Africa’s critically acclaimed feminist web series The Foxy Five. Newman was commissioned by NOWNESS, British Film Institute and the British Council to write and direct a short film exploring diaspora aesthetics and issues of afro-futurism, The Dream That Refused Me (2021) which won two awards at the Ciclope Africa Awards Festival as well as a Silver Cannes Young Director Award. Her newest short film Inside Out premiered at the Encounters South African International Documentary Festival 2021. Most recently Newman won Bronze for the Shots EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) 2021 New Director of the Year Award.