Brain: Julianknxx
Poet and artist Julianknxx interprets the brain through a film which aims to highlight the difficulties that black people face moving through the world whilst being required to live their true self. They ask the viewer to consider: how do you imagine your own future, and your own beauty within this existence?
Poet and artist Julianknxx interprets the brain through a film which aims to highlight the difficulties that black people face moving through the world whilst being required to live their true self. They ask the viewer to consider: how do you imagine your own future, and your own beauty within this existence?
- What is your name and how would you describe what you do?
Julianknxx: JulianKnxx, poet and visual artist.
- What’s your background?
JK: Sierra Leonean
- What inspires you?
JK: I get inspiration from all over the place, my lived environment and everything that is happening around me. I go to exhibitions and watch films, but still remember to take moments of solitude and make time to read poetry from my favourite poets.
- What is the ambition behind your practice?
JK: I use my personal history as a prism through which to deconstruct dominant perspectives on African art, ideas, history and culture. Using symbolism and complex layering, my work conveys our continuing and necessary task of defining and redefining ourselves through the simultaneous rejection of extrinsic labels and repositioning of ourselves within new collective narratives.
- What did you hope to convey with your Bodies Of Knowledge film?
JK: I hope to highlight the difficulties that black people face moving through the world whilst being required to live their true self, as well as the version of themselves that lives in the imagination of others. It poses the question: how do you imagine your own future, and your own beauty within this existence? The piece centres around the ideas from the writings and thinkings of W. E. Du Bois on the Double Consciousness of Black people in America, Elizabeth Alexander’s ‘The Black Interior’, and Gayatri Chakravorty’s ‘Can the subaltern speak?’.
