CUBITT CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP: NO REAL CLOSURE (2020-2)
Absent is the disproportionate emphasis on surface-level survey style programmes and representational focus: when we gather, we do so to manifest collaboration, exchange, dialogue, relationships – a sum greater than its individual parts.
No Real Closure was a platform for experimentation and development of black artistic practice across exhibitions, moving image, text, performance and public programming.
In a world of pandemics and insurrections, No Real Closure spoke to the persistent and ever present wounds of anti-blackness, always already open. There is no closure to our ongoing work of dismantling the violent structures within which we cannot breathe. No closure to our collective resilience, nor to our communal grieving. No Real Closure as acknowledgement and refusal, at once commitment and surrender.
R.I.P. GERMAIN: DEAD YARD (2020)
R.I.P Germain’s Dead Yard explored multiple forms of death and mourning relating to the artist's personal experiences and the ongoing viscerality of Black life in the UK. In addition to literal explorations of death and mourning, the exhibition gestured towards psychological and philosophical types of death: ego death, social death, and the mourning associated with incarceration, martyrdom and near-death experiences.
AJAMU: ARCHIVAL SENSORIA (2021)
Drawing on Ajamu’s personal archive, collected over the artist’s 30 year career, as well as previously unexhibitied contact sheets, personal photos, and community documentation, Ajamu: Archival Sensoria celebrated black queer life through the artists’ visual tribute to the generative creativity of LGBTQ+ and gender non-conforming lives.
CAMARA TAYLOR: A RANT, A REEL (2021)
Camara Taylor’s a rant! a reel! was borne out of ongoing research by the artist into ‘silt’ and the process of ‘desilting’ as both metaphor and methodology to examine Scotland’s intimate entanglement and key roles in the development of the current global racialised order.
REEL: AXIS, NOT POLES (2022)
Reel: Axis, Not Poles was a screening programme of experimental moving image shorts by contemporary Black artists from across the diaspora: Che Applewhaite, Dita Hashi, Kondo Heller, S*an D. Henry Smith and Kadeem Oak.
SHENECE ORETHA: AH SO IT GO, AH NO SO IT GO, GO SO! (2022)
Shenece Oretha’s Ah So It Go, Ah No So It Go, Go So! offered a meditation on belonging, land, growing and grounding, reverberating through poetry, oral traditions and embodied knowing. The culmination of a year-long residency on an allotment in North London, and a development residency in Cubitt’s Studio One, Ah So It Go considered the poetry and complexity of the language of horticulture and cultivation in relation to Black diaspora, migration and culture.