About the performance
Kitso is curious about a sensibility captured in Fred Moten’s consideration; “walking in another world while passing through this one”1. She will present work that thinks through my preoccupation with the erasure and truncating of Black subjectivity, looking for modalities for articulating the complexities of Black subjectivity that has been denied its histories, humanity and “Being”. She plays with the idea that, as a marginalised subjugated being, one inhabits multiple/simultaneous realities with the possibilities of navigating across them. Kitso thinks of the “complex personhood”2 of the subjugated as a ghostly haunting presence when viewed through a hegemonic lens that edits their humanity. However, beyond the bounds of the hegemonic there are other worlds, epistemies, cosmologies and ontologies that can and do recognise their “envisioned self”3 that is elided by authority. She'Il draw on the potential of this “multidimensional” perception of the suppressed. She thinks through how site/place/history might “appear” when mediated through the eyes of the ghostly others towards narrating a fragmentary impressionistic [hi]story. She is interested in charting flows across time and space (forced, restricted and otherwise) that shape our sociohistoric reality through this viewpoint, developing a visual language for thinking through the hauntings that trouble a “reality” which emerged in “the wake”4 of chattel slavery and the slippages beyond it, seen through the lens of “Black Light”5.
1 Moten, 2018, 2 Gordon, 1997, 3 Biko, 1987, 4 Sharpe, 2016, 5 Ferreira da Silva
In this video Lelliott sits with the ghost as she shifts form and is in ever changing formation, negotiating presence and marking the thresholds to the many worlds she traverses.
Sensitive Content Warning
There is some nudity in I Was Her and She Was Me and Those We Might Become.
Lelliott’s work deals with themes of historic trauma and violence in terms of slavery and colonialism but there is generally no depiction/reproduction of these violences in the work itself.
What is Research Now? presents a full year of programming around interconnected strands that ask us to think more curiously, critically and open-endedly about the role and practice of the arts.
The theme is led by the question: Can research in the arts enable us to live and better inhabit the world together? It will bring artists, curators, writers, scholars, activists, and thinkers from a range of different backgrounds to think together through lectures, performances, conversations, and hands-on workshops at the Paul Mellon Centre in London.
In May, events will explore interconnected strands:
'Ongoing Colonial Worlds' asking what research is under conditions of occupation and unrest.
'On Looking' show us that how we look changes how we understand the world around us.
