POETICS OF BECOMING

POETICS OF BECOMING

The Second Iteration of SANKOFA

A Continuing Exhibition Series by RCA BLK

If the inaugural SANKOFA exhibition invited a return, a reaching back to retrieve what was forgotten, displaced, or disowned, then Poetics of Becoming extends that gesture toward a process of continuous renewal.

Here, becoming is neither linear progression nor fixed arrival, but a recursive and relational methodology: a movement shaped by citation, refusal, and the reassembly of diasporic knowledge across form, discipline, and generation.

Presenting the work of twenty-seven Black and Afro-diasporic artists within the RCA BLK community, the exhibition unfolds as a spatial and temporal constellation, centering the nonlinear, the plural, and the opaque. It resists containment, privileging not resolution but resonance. Visitors are invited to move through traces and reverberations that open onto multiple temporalities, where sound, image, and material map the shifting contours of transformation. What is fetched through return is neither static nor past; it is active, unfixed, and continually reconfigured.

“One must consent not to be a single being.” - Édouard Glissant

Guided by the thought of Édouard Glissant, the exhibition approaches artistic practice as a form of reorientation, one that embraces opacity over transparency, accumulation over clarity, and multiplicity over linear narrative. Here, opacity is not a barrier to understanding but a mode of relation: an insistence on the complexity and irreducibility of experience, where meaning thickens rather than resolves. Through this lens, the works gathered here do not seek unity but resonate across difference, time, and practice, enacting Glissant’s poetics through layered materials, methods, and the continual interplay of opacity and emergence.

Curated by Julita Mahrer Viñas, in collaboration with and supported by RCA BLK, the exhibition is rooted in an ethos of listening, gathering, and speculative renewal. It holds space for inheritance not as retrospection, but as active, ongoing practice.

Staged in the RCA Hangar Space, Poetics of Becoming continues a curatorial trajectory initiated by SANKOFA (2024) and RCA Black (2011), landmark milestones that redefined how Black presence and artistic excellence are encountered within the Royal College of Art. This iteration does not repeat; it expands, deepening the commitment to relation, inheritance, and the evolving poetics of Black becoming in London and worldwide.

Poetics of Becoming is thus less an exhibition than an unfolding: an invitation to dwell within relation, to listen across distance, and to imagine what might yet come into form.

Invited artists:

Ramone K Anderson

Shanti Bell

Grace Blenkinsop

Canaan J Brown

Andrew Pierre Hart

Tyreis Holder

Melanie Issaka

Favour Jonathan

James Jordan Johnson

Jordan Zayas Kelly

Xavier Laurent Leopold

Shayla Marshall

Misha Maseka

Emily Alice Mitchell

Emily Moore

Suni Mullen

A'isha Odera Usman Mu'azu

Chris Ofili

Chiedu Okonta

Adjani Okpu-Egbe

Tomilola Olumide

Charlie Philips

Bianca Saunders

Aisha Seriki

Ransom Sutton

Rudolph Taylor

Bryant Mclaughlin Van-Low

Joshua Woolford

Joseph Yorke-Wescott