Julianknxx

The film considers what it means to be free to move, not as in leave or flee, but to move. It explores the ability of the environments we live in – especially cities – to create the space people need to move. Shot in Freetown, Sierra Leone, it explores the power of the creative sectors in the city and their immense potential.

Sierra Leonian artist Julianknxx uses his personal history as a prism to deconstruct dominant perspectives on African art, history, and culture. Rich with symbolism, his work conveys the Black experience of defining and redefining the self, rejecting labels to form new collective narratives. Offering song and music as forms of resistance, the exhibition invokes new understandings of what it means to be caught between, and to be of, multiple places. Choirs and musicians from cities across Europe give voice to a single refrain: ‘We are what’s left of us’, transforming the Curve into a collaborative space of communication. As the philosopher Édouard Glissant has written: ‘you can change with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself.’

Part of a collection of poems, visuals and stories centring on African identity.

The disproportionate impact of air pollution in the inner city, the stark realities of environmental poverty, the oppressive existence of melanated bodies and the working-class, who are often forced to live in urban estates and congested pockets of our city.

At once, reflective of reality and consciousness, and self-made fantasies born from distortion, the worlds we dream are complex, and multi-faceted. In pooling disparate fragments from our waking hours, they become an entity all their own, shaped by our thoughts and experiences, yet realized in something entirely fictionalized.

The Moko Jumbie, stilt-walking spirit found in Caribbean carnival culture, wanders around South London’s Market Row in Brixton Village

In his work, Julianknxx proposes radical listening: the past and the present brush up against each other, and history is not revealed as a static account, but as something that pulses, that is remade at every turn. At the crossroads of art and politics, his images and sounds remind us that our stories were never just the colonial narratives we were told – they are also what we keep singing, even when no one seems to be listening. Work developed during the LUMA Arles Residency Program and commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 36th Bienal.

In a world where Black people are often confined by the myths of the Western imagination, the embrace of the fantastic holds a powerful significance - not as an escape from reality, but as a way to challenge the status quo and envision new possibilities for Black identity and personhood. In the Black Fantastic weaves together dazzling imagery and thought-provoking conversations with leading artists and thinkers, celebrating the brilliance, imagination, and world-building of Black creators.