To make his latest work, poet and film-maker Julian Knox went on quite a journey – literally. The artist, who styles his name as Julianknxx, visited nine European cities – Lisbon, Hamburg, Berlin, Marseille, Antwerp, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and London – and in each one collected what he calls “encounters” with Black residents there.
“Some people read a poem, some people sang, some people danced,” the 36-year-old says. An artist in Lisbon would only let him film her while she slept, “’cos I’m tired of talking about Blackness and want to rest”, he remembers her saying. He giggles: “The offering could be whatever it is. I couldn’t say no.”
Chorus in Rememory of Flight is Julianknxx’s first institutional solo installation and is set to debut at the Barbican in London this week. Well, it will when he’s actually finished the poems he’s writing for the exhibition. When we meet, a few weeks before it opens, Julianknxx is still applying the finishing touches. In their central London office at workspace-cum-exhibition area 180 Studios, editor Harry Deadman sits at a desk in the corner with headphones on, silently sequencing the show’s main film. Julianknxx shows me some of a rough cut featuring sweeping shots over cityscapes, spliced with scenes of the artists, choirs and locals – many now friends – whom he and his research team met during the journey.
The idea came to Julianknxx in 2021 when he was collaborating with choirs and dancers for his Black Corporeal series, which blended poetry, live singing and films into an exploration of Blackness and belonging. Julianknxx has first-hand experience of a shifting notion of home: he is Sierra Leonean, and fled the early 1990s civil war with family to spend a few years in Gambia before settling in London as a teen.
The new installation’s title comes from two books: Lorna McDaniel’s Praisesongs in Rememory of Flight and Paule Marshall’s novel Praisesong for the Widow. “The whole thing is stitched together as a chorus: the songs people gave as offerings to me,” he says. But you also get conversations and monologues ruminating on what it means to set down new roots in Europe, from academic George Shire and musician Thabo Mkwananzi, both Zimbabwean, as well as an incredibly charming Black American tour guide in Marseille. “It’s all mixed in as one chorus. The ‘rememory’ part is this idea of listening practice. Of sitting down with people and saying, ‘Whatever it is you’ll offer, I’ll take.’”
The poems, once they’re ready (“I finished one last night!”), will join shorter films playing on seven screens as you move through the Curve gallery. His installations can feel like a mixture of independent cinema and a profoundly moving history lesson. He’s come a long way since reading his poetry aloud at university ACS (African Caribbean Society) events, from running Studioknxx to being labelled a multidisciplinary artist to look out for by GQ and Art Basel. His work has been in the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Lisbon’s Gulbenkian and the Gagosian, as well as the odd fashion event. Barbican senior curator Eleanor Nairne says she was “blown away by the lyricism of his film-making” after first visiting his studio, and feels inspired by “the sheer scale of his imagination” now.
The London section of Julianknxx’s new film focuses on the financial Square Mile. “I’m looking at how it played such a big part in the slave trade and the movement of people,” he says. “And how it still has its own government now. Money runs things.” He chuckles as he recalls learning about the feudal quit rents that the City of London annually pays to the Crown. “Like, this is such a gangster thing. Why are people letting this happen?”
Julianknxx’s work is essentially performance poetry, only without any of the naff associations that may conjure up. It is reflective, almost meditative, but doesn’t leave you tangled in its academic roots. Julianknxx uses it to voice his own ideas and the African diaspora’s untold stories. “The more I’m opening up my world view, the more I’m realising that white supremacy turns everything upside down,” he says. “And our histories are not really what the conqueror has tried to tell us.” Rather, he looks to find them in lullabies passed down from mothers to their children, as he learned from Comorians in Marseille, or in the largely Black neighbourhoods encircling Lisbon’s centre, where tourists rarely venture.
The stories he collected are so rich and varied that Julianknxx intends to mostly step back from the finished work and let his film’s subjects take the lead. Well, once he’s written the remaining poems, that is.
Julianknxx: Chorus in Rememory of Flight is at the Barbican Curve, London, 14 September to 11 February, and was co-commissioned by WePresent
