Helen Marten

 (2023) is a short video that cohabits the complex realms of the artist’s sculptural and installation works. Over a series of largely depopulated scenes – a bedroom, an empty swimming pool, a backyard and other snowy vistas – we hear a voice-over repeatedly set the scene for a would-be play, each a dizzying revision that replaces the last. Here we discuss Marten’s impetus for making the film, her reasons to be merciless when making an artwork, and the need to talk about the weather.



, I was taken by the voice-over, read by Gwendoline Christie, which describes a process of the excision of body parts – of cutting off a leg, an arm and removing innards. It seems you want to begin by throwing out the body.




This text is excerpted from a chapter in Roger Caillois’ book 

 (1961) that describes the social function of games. It recounts a dystopic Inuit game of cup-and-ball, where a single participant is disguised as a schematically stylized animal – a fish or a bear – and ‘stabbed’ many times by countless friends engaged in playing the game. The highly specific nature of the play means that each mode of attack, the positioning of the knife in the hand, the rhythmic move towards the act of stabbing must be performed with the correct gesture and in the correct order; if the participant fails in this replication of given movements, the knife is passed to the next player. Throughout the actions of attack and withdrawal, the player with the knife must narrate the story of a journey or a hunt, enumerating each of the phases of attack and dismemberment. The player is free to envisage beyond animal prey, occasionally substituting the proxy ‘animal’ player into the dialogue and weaponizing the attack upon the friend in costume: I beat 

head. The dialogue that Caillois recounts is so abrupt, so distinctly unadorned in its literal linguistic tone, but the parsing of the actions themselves is tender and specific to the degree of total mania: 

 folds the skin in half, soaks it in urine, dries it in the sun

 I love the idea that within the pathology of a social death or excoriation, there are multiple speeds of revelation: that within the refrain of total violence, there is equally tactile specificity and instinct for preservation. I found the whole constellation fascinating, imagining that the use of animals as prey within the format of the game is something of an eccentric surplus, a kind of cute security function (like a notation) that permits social violence at a soft remove. I imagined the replication of this text within the video as a prologue, a cataloguing of a very specific emptying out of literally depicted figuration. The final words – 

the pieces for the dogs, the dogs eat – 

are algorithmic in the sense of having reduced the human physicality to zero – a subtraction – whilst offering a digestive filling – an addition – to the roaming animals forthcoming. The text is a portent of sorts, theatre in a diagrammatic and deliberate mode, but absolute abstraction too, if considering a system for quantifying pleasure.


The film shows a series of depopulated habitats that codes as a generic suburban North American town, including a vacated home and barn surrounded by woodland. Contours of lives are felt but not made visible. A sense of unease is underscored by the strike of a pensive piano chord and occasional digital brush of sound. What led you to want to make these environments for this film?



The score is brilliantly composed by Beatrice Dillon, using physical modelling synthesis combined with live piano and clarinet sequences. The sound terms of such a method of composition enable the building of certain hypothetical ‘spaces’ and reciprocal ‘instigators’, such that you can invent the tonal quality of both the receiving environment and the tool that activates it: a shape made of lead struck by an object made of glass wrapped in leather, for instance. The approach is radically expansive, but of course the sonic delivery of the score does not itemize the ingredients. This type of hyper-specificity is also important to each of the environments of the video. Every scene unfolds with an incredible amount of detail – the wooden remnant texture and number of holes excavated in a concrete wall; the slump and quantity of snow on a branch; the positioning of planks and stones on a burnt-out car. Each of these details is pre-drawn in ink, plotted by me in endless written descriptions and animation cel sheets. I’m interested in this spatial paradox of absurdly laboured detail existing in a suspended state, piled up until it almost negates itself to emptiness. The cognitive dissonance is extreme because these are all plausible environments – both domestically and as part of a ruptured capture of nature – but they are exactly nowhere. Of course there are inferences, and these are important too, but the gesturing is miscellaneous and changing rather than precisely underlined. And this simulation exists also in multiple dimensions because the literal substance we are crafting is a treachery, the ghost matter of CGI. Akin to the opening prologue, the dissection of parts is both overarchingly swift – the generic blanketing of snow – but sadistically controlled: the arrangement of objects on a table, how each falls into a geometrically gridded, diagram-like experiential traffic. These are careful instigations of overlap. And snow, too, like a white tablecloth, like an empty page, is a flirtatiously invitational plane.



Rather than encountering your own depictions of humans, we see the appearance of people or bodies through the quotation of other artists’ works, for example Gustave Courbet’s 

 (1933), alongside a more pornographic-type image pinned to a clothes line and flapping in the breeze. It is perhaps no accident that in two of these images we are looking at a vulva. Could you say something about the selection of these artworks?



I love this question! Each of the images belongs to a varying scale of unabashed perversity and indulgence. The Courbet is shorthand and universal. The pubic hair, the opened thighs are radically present and dense, but the body is dimensionally cropped in the manner of a bizarre amputation: there are no full limbs to mobilize the prowess of this implied female shape, so the body instead is inferred as a supplicant, a kind of ambiguous votive vessel to the be fucked and filled on repetitive terms that do not belong to the woman herself. Of course the title implicates both crassly and with wonder, but ultimately the image-vulva belongs to a domain of male structural power. The controversy of Balthus is his erotic fixation on young girls, but this abject complication leads to some very provocative painterly subversions. 

is paired in the video with a second Balthus painting, 

 (1955). The centralized graphic protagonist of 

 is an entirely white-clad and face-obscured baker/decorator carrying a wooden plank. The symbolism is fervent: the man totally unspecific, de-facialized, but radically phallic in his kinetic posture – the plank is diagonally elongated and upright in intent! In pairing the images side by side, I have deliberately rescaled the naked child to the same size as the mercantile man. They are newly equivalent forms. What’s interesting between them is the corruption of detail: the child figure may be completely naked, but she is highly stylized, softened to the degree of becoming only a few slight curve inflections, more like an economically moulded piece of bone than actual radiant flesh. She is an absent and unparticipating figure; the mantel she stands before becomes another surrogate and densely decorative vulva. The street scene in contrast is impressively detailed and painstakingly choreographed, such that every bodily interaction is an attentive part of highly mobile scenography.

In making a simple size analogy between the figures, the parity between male and pubescent child is staggeringly unhinged; terminologies of desire are sublimated beneath algorithmic painterly tricks: geometric forms that offer vectors and holes of flight. The pornography is equally removed, rendered in black and white as a photograph, but with none of the wet pleasure-warmth of any kind of sex. The bodies are once again cropped so they are part of an abstract figuration rather than pure depiction. In all cases, the images have been manipulated in CGI to appear as on paper – fly-posted, pasted to walls, blowing in the breeze. There is a recasting of historicized painting as deliberately causal, excerpted imagery, as casually snipped Jpegs. The historicizing intent has been stripped out, with each image not an icon but part of a poor relegation. The simple answer to this question would be that as bodies, we are all mad particles, raggedly sacks and a collection of small holes in continual mobile use; but the penetrative power in meaning and metaphor alike is continually rearranging. The more complicated answer is likely an avalanche of gender or sexuality marginalization and exploitation.

An occasional light wind animates sequences, while in other moments other seasons, rain or fire takes a prominent role; at other points we become aware in a shift in daylight. These more abstract forms of animation seem to hold fascination – it feels as if you are drawing our attention to the way moments and sequences of experience are in fact indirectly ordered by outside conditions.



, there is a deliberate reckoning of the world as complicit in a type of innate ‘languaging’, whereby all interactions of matter, in a default atomic way, are part of the mobile wonder of the universe: all pieces of all things scattered and overlapping in infinite combinations of tactile exchange. This premise is reliant on the idea of a default mode of forming grammar – rhythms and punctuation – from object overlap, from sound, from structure, from metaphor, and thus creating new vehicles of meaning into which bodies and conditions plunge themselves: a kind of Newtonian action and reaction clause. Birds take flight, accumulate and land, their silhouettes becoming punctuation and rhythm like notes on a music score. Wind is myth and temperament. Weather is analogous as a personal emotional barometer – the nuanced intensities of apathy or bodily dissatisfaction – but it is also social code and distraction. We talk about weather colloquially to disguise discomfort or alleviate social fatigue. Time, here, then, is perhaps not meant as pulse or metronomic speed but as more physical span or length – the space between 

 – but not something segmented like a ruler where portions are literal, but something mythic and encompassing, with the possibility of even and uneven behaviour, like a tree or a bush. The weather is conceptual instigator: beautiful; glacially erratic.


In one striking scene we see a deer that appears shot, its mouth bloody, while a drawing of a deer is lodged under the animal; an iPhone and a paper cut-out in the shape of a snowflake rest on its side as a more realistically rendered snow falls from above. Do you see your work as producing or commenting upon forms of dissociation that otherwise linger or are hidden in today’s dizzying material world?



I don’t see them as dissociation, but more an optimistic, wilful defiance. The dead deer is a literal bleeding animal, but the accumulation of parts atop its body are not composed for the convenience of presentation, rather they belong to the reality of our throbbing human insatiability. Pleasure taken and pleasure abandoned. The iPhone and the paper snowflake are loaded motifs, metaphor and analogy alike – they are 

 – but they are equally humble and shorthand. There is a powerful, refined stillness to the deer, despite its evidently draining prowess, to even offer itself as a tablet upon which to host these items – a collusion in the sacrilege of desecration that triumphs as a kind of elegiac clarity. The phone is replaced at times by ribbons, by oranges and lemons, by an owl that lands to post vigil – the symbolism is hefty. But there is absolutely no irony to this circulation of objects. The deer is the mystical avatar of unplottable realms of language or speech as the spectre. It is also desperate romanticism, unreasonable silence, passionate absurdity – love and shame conjoined.



We tend to think of the descriptive role of language as additive, as if we are endlessly refining the realms of the sensory and what is observed or thought. However, it doesn’t come as a surprise when the sentence ‘Mathematics is a major category’ is firmly uttered by the voice-over – given that one often feels when watching this film that one is in the realm of a visual and linguistic play of subtraction and addition. Indeed, there is even the use of homonyms of ‘nun’ and ‘deer’ to imagine a calculus of objects culminating as something both expensive and voided.



 became an important guide. The book speaks about complicated and fanatic systems of quantifying pleasure, the social function of games and performance, the corruption of intoxication, chance, competition and all manner of other strangeness. There is a refrain in the script, repeated numerous times: 

butterfly, plus elephant, plus cat, plus dead man, plus sailor, plus nun equals deer

. This text is taken from the Caillois book.

 I love the abstract absurdity of this surrogation or simulation – how a simple mathematical term is used as illustrative metaphor – with the animal as a cipher for a known quantity that is both its libidinal self and also a number or a recognizable graphic form. The text and the characters within it are constantly moving in and out of disguise, like putting on masks, or allowing themselves to be rigged, as though part of an analogue puppet show. The very logic of the script is that it follows a singular voice – the ‘I’ – that is aware of its participation in a theatrical event. This voice sometimes splits into ‘we’ and the control is shared, but disembodied. The whole text is deeply meta, a play within a play, within a play. The theatre of theatre! The voice-over is melancholic and solipsistic, but it also performs: the audience is privy to and must engage with both the images of the performance and the mechanics of it.

From the Caillois book, I learnt about a kind of bingo (

) played in Brazil and a form of ‘Chinese charades’ (

) played in Cuba. These games are fully life-encompassing organizations of betting and ritualistic performance. They illustrate the relationships between chance and superstition: money, animals, favours, objects – all change hands and become significant for gambling outcomes. The games are both a social and theoretical lottery (they are predisposed to corruption and the whim of the ceremonial organizers) but they also involve intense calculations and mathematic risk. Animals are given quantities and numbers, and the signs and concordance of the games are adopted into daily life: for instance, a child, instead of adding 2 + 9 + 3 = 14, will add something like the refrain: 

butterfly plus elephant plus cat plus whore plus peacock equals grave

. The terms are fantastical and gorgeous but lodged within a very specific and nuanced logic. The convolution is instead a form of shorthand, a pictographic means of rapid communication. In 

 there are 36 animal (and object) terms, and each is superimposed onto a corresponding body part (see diagram). There are 36 ‘chapters’ in my spoken script, and every animal, item or adjective used within the game is incorporated into the script’s text (and likewise the video’s visuals). Every part is accounted for, even if fleetingly, so the summation of parts belongs to a pre-existing circuitry. This is wildly exhilarating to me – the idea of inflicting panic or uncertainty on an otherwise lucid mind via complex diagrammatic games where the very substance of living becomes like a more embellished version of roulette.

Further, do you view the material construction of adding and subtracting material in your ‘sculptural’ gallery work differently from that of filmic or linguistic worlds?



It’s all a similar obsession – the continual möbius of image and language that is not binary, but operationally polyvocal; that ever speaks to root, to outline, to surface, to logic, but equally to temperature and speed and knot. Word-forms litter dozens of compound image-forms in their wake and vice versa. The exquisite miracle of this is a refusal of stillness, the dynamic reminder that when one thing touches another, this contextual proximity and possibility for structural rhyme shifts identities in space. A continual, perpetual engine.



I’m also interested in the durational aspect of both the book and filmic forms and how they often employ editors, a job often viewed as producing a ‘subtractive’ element or a ‘cut’ – it’s also a labour that is often rarely examined in the processes of production. Of course, I have an interest in this subject, but I wondered what your thoughts on editors might be – whether you use one or not?



For my fictional writing, yes, I use an editor – I have a literary agent and my novel was edited and generally recomposed in deep collaboration with the publisher. And likewise for my essayistic writing, but less so. For the videos, I make the editing decisions, the cuts, sequencing myself. Somebody wrote in the context of my work recently, ‘even Gertrude Stein had an editor’, which I found both hilarious and hurtful because its angry cynicism entirely missed the operative devotion! And equally the pleasure.

Your writing takes on a certain schematic way of parsing meaning – there is often a repeating of an opening phrase of a sentence, such as ‘I am’ or ‘What is’. With each repetition we try and construct a set of relations between things, but they ultimately and playfully seem to undo any given order of relations – at least in any obvious way. It is as if you use these kinds of schemata to enable descriptive words to become unmoored from their functioning use in a sentence, placing us somewhere materially odd. Sometimes this can feel almost suffocating, like wanting to take a breath back to some cognitive order – indeed, even the voice-over reminds herself to take a breath. Could you talk a little about how you conceptualize listing in your writing?



All words seek to rove and migrate, with their phonetic structures offering rules to be manipulated or stylized. Language incorporates whilst simultaneously being dislodged from concrete signifiers. The way a word is formed by the lips as languorous or repetitive, spiky or dripping thus shifts the first legibility of its register by the ear, then the mind’s eye. The circuitry is dialled up or down, guided by both motivated language modelling and social arbitrariness. The same is true for material, and its implementation over shape and space. Meaning is held and then kicked away. There are deliberate edges and shadow carriers in those gaps. The list could be thought of as a tactic of calculated expansion – a rapid means of pushing things together, but also, by virtue of the spoken or typographic format, creating productive gaps in which exponential newness arises. We are dealing with already laden discursive indexes, because language and its corresponding world-substances are ancient. They are baggage. And the list is a means of temporarily containing this elasticity. I love Lucy Ellmann’s 

 (2019) because it is exactly this kind of knowing expansion – a literal run-on of incidence and emotive flirtations that harbour all manner of semantic pathologies and therefore irritations. The list is a formal conundrum in this sense, because on first glimpse it is expedience, but what it actually tethers is sublime density. And I suppose that is the grand metaphor of contemporaneity: we have become masters of generating skins to rename objects, to falsely instil volume on emptiness and to reactivate substance with a glib performativity.



I remember hearing you describe, several years ago at the opening of your show at the Serpentine, how the process between drawing your work in CAD and its physical rendering for a gallery space is merciless in its translation – meaning that there is little alteration in the transference between two- and three-dimensional realms. I had never heard the word merciless ever used in the context of making art before – I wonder if you still feel the same way about the process between drawing and making?



Ha! Yes! I still think making of all kinds is merciless, but that mercilessness also accrues a delirious aggregation of pleasure. It’s not an uncomplicated satisfaction, but it isn’t merciless in the mode of masochism, either! I recently wrote about a friend’s work and described the process of a painter’s desire to conflate visual-linguistic operations as comedically akin to the cannibal or serial killer – a looped transcript of obsessive slicing and sticking back together again. There is some facetiousness here, but also genuine intent in the idea of finding the generative through pleasurable mess – through error, through distortion, through forcing your way between translation and towards something 

. Drawing is hugely important to me: drawing for actual works on paper, drawing to diagram, drawing to sketch, and drawing to catch and to catalogue. Drawing also as a kind of listing. I use it in very different speeds. What I meant about the ‘merciless’ translation between CAD space and real space is the deception of labour – there is so much ruthless detail and planning involved, and when something’s inherent material language is part of the hermetic process of fabrication, that is often simply not legible to an audience. Ask most people how any object on the table in front of them is made and they will be unable to break down even a few stages of the mechanics of its arrival in the world. It is fascinating to me to understand how that knowledge can be wielded and sublimated, how you can use the audibility of process at many different levels. The mercilessness I speak about is also to say that nothing is arbitrary. Each component belongs to a beginning intent that is held and carried through to the end. Of course, intuitive mannerisms occur, accident occurs, but the parts and their 

 moments are really defined right at the beginning.



You have mentioned the writing of Bernard Tschumi and his architectural treatise 

, dating from the late 1970s. The writing quite radically considers time, event and motion in relation to architecture, and his observation that ‘when spaces and events are functionally independent of one another, one observes a strategy of indifference in which no architectural considerations depend on utilitarian ones, in which space has one logic and events another’, seemed somehow prescient here.

 I’m interested in this idea of indifference and how your work seems to generate unexpected frictions, or bring things into play that are otherwise unrelated. Tschumi’s quote also brings to mind the high modernism of the gallery model itself – personally, I don’t view your work as functionally independent of or indifferent to the spaces it inhabits during the course of an exhibition, but I wondered what your thoughts might be here?

I love Tschumi’s writing and thinking, but I agree with you that the characterization of indifference might equally miss the idea of a given site’s contemporary flexibility, its multiple readings. Tschumi’s preoccupations somehow set the idea of the ‘state’ model and the ‘family’ or domestic model crashing together under conditions that restore primacy to the fixed concepts of form, measurement and mathematics: phobia and function. I’m totally into that idea, because it is part of architecture’s invitation to engage with its crassly symbolic persuasions. But there is definitely a whiff of heteronormativity in his writings that especially misses the energetic nuances of social or spatial queerness. Tschumi understands how to invent volumes that simultaneously constitute assurance and nefarious exploit. I also love that. I think 

 is a radically inspirational text. To imagine that a bench or a bush might be explicitly responsible for, or a reportable witness to, a suicide or a crime is an eccentric principle, but it also describes the radical overlap of the world’s addictively rhyming energies. He diagrams public space into the private space in a method that produces theatrical grammar akin to novelistic writing. Personally, when I am making work, its site-specificity is important because it necessitates on a very basic level how symbols can be manipulated or excerpted. I often mirror parts of a building within the work itself – conceptual markers of literal compass points; windows; the floor plan of walls projecting theoretically upwards and retranslated into the layout of other works, for example. So yes, I think space and logic belong to the same type of transcript, but you can dial in and out of their respective visibilities.



I guess not unrelated here is also Sara Ahmed’s writing on use, and the deliberate provocation of misuse as a way to queer or interrupt normative patterns of relations. Do you see your writing as producing different desiring arrangements?



Definitely! I always think about how the primary operative index of a tool, for instance, is male-dominated – the historicized function of it belongs with total and unflinching hegemony to the patriarchy. I think it is interesting that subculture and queerness has coopted that masculinity. The possibilities of utility fracturing out to adoption by unapologetic sexuality, by kitsch or generative pornography is beautiful. I think my work absolutely has a commitment to queerness that is not necessarily about a political positioning of gender or sexuality, but about the methods of 

 that allow a tonal kind of shading to appear in both words and materials. That ‘shading’ is the pertinent point – the degree by which anything chooses to become visible. And that visibility may also come unannounced or unlocatable, and that is part of the inexhaustibility of creating plural content. I think this idea of deliberate misuse might also be why animals so frequently appear in my work – the bestial apocalypse!

 observation of someone 'feeling' themselves ‘becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put’, seems somehow relevant when looking at your work.

 Or least it came to my mind when viewing your films, not least the vertiginous sense of the constructed digital image and the emptiness beyond what has been coded.



I love Caillois. Imagine the end of a human form as darkness, and thus dust. Fittingly, dust is the antithesis to the digital realm. In theory it is everything technology detests, but in reality it gathers on everything, on all our devices, our structural preservations, so there is an uncomfortable if not inevitable coupling. In making digital animation, the beginning process is in some ways comparable to sweeping a surface – clearing the counter for action. Layering skins and light in an algorithmic precision of tool adoption that is actually incredibly fleshy, creating renders in CGI involves deftness of movement. There’s rigging and calculation, so a deeply tactile, hand-skilled nod to traditional set design or model making. In piecing everything together, there is a haptic intensity to the physical labour, but this is a quality that is completely stripped out once the image is rendered. The final look of digital animation is seamlessly gorgeous, terrifying, airless. It is impossible to look around the corners, to judge the temperature. It is as if in the process of compiling, of cutting, editing and re-sampling, there’s a forcing of breath (of life!) into image. And then with each sealing off of the layers, of smoothing out the curves and filling in the weights with texture, colour or light, these breaths become sharper and sharper. The more realistic the digital becomes, the more restricted its breathing, until there is no space for excess air beyond the shell of the render. So, paradoxically, the more gorgeous and impenetrable a digital image becomes, the more brutal a set of masks it suggests, and the less life it lets in. The animation is impossibly lifeless, but incredulously animated. This is long-established fact in digital processing.

Notes

Biographies 

Writing A Play (dark blue orchard)

screening

Evan Ifekoya

Kick drum pattern, hi-hat sequence, ‘the bass is pulsing through’. Disco! Too much work. The picket line! Bad news. Evan Ifekoya’s 2014 video work 

 sends mixed signals. The disco ball is already spinning with gusto – and it’s still being made, by hand, from scratch. Archival footage of people bouncing through the tail end of the twentieth century is interspersed with close-ups of manual labour and Facebook timelines that look threateningly contemporary. The form of the work is clearly 

, but casually so: the artist-as-pop-star starring in it, played by Ifekoya themselves, has too much going on to really be bothered.

, like the best tracks in the genre, stems from the sequencing of several disparate historical layers: there are of course the glitzy 1980s colour schemes, MTV-era conventions, geometrical outfit choices. Part of this zeitgeist is sampled from found footage collected in the Prelinger archive, a collection dedicated precisely to ephemeral moving images of everyday life that would otherwise fly under the historical radar. On another level, however, this revival feels specific to a particular era of the internet that is also already historical: the beat is imbued with a bounce specific to the types of electroclash that emerged from pirated music production software in the 2000s; the montage style has gloriously goofy iMovie undertones. In a 2018 essay for 

, Ifekoya writes: ‘The way I relate to music today is the result of having had access to the internet from a young age.’

 They cite the magical anonymity of online forums, the ‘infinite libraries’ of Napster and Soulseek as templates for how they began to live with sound. In 2014, of course, thisversion of onlineness, its thrills of social experimentation and DIY cultural production, its promise of new political forms, had 

 mostly vanished into monetization, giving way to the addictive bombardment of bad news that has since been cutting into global attention spans. But in 

, a faint echo of internet optimism can at least still be constructed through sampling, in this case, through disco. If one could certainly come across a tonally similar, if less poignant, music video spoof on TikTok now, we can’t even access 

 is full of, by way of nostalgia anymore.

In a similar vein, when Ifekoya goes, ‘all these bad news on my Twitter feed’: what registered as 

 in 2014? As a decade sits awkwardly in the uncanny valley between not-the-present-anymore and not-quite-yet-history, one might have to google the specifics (at least I did): in February, Russia sent troops into Ukraine in an operation that would result in the annexation of Crimea. The summer of 2014 also saw over two thousand Palestinians killed in the deadliest twenty-first-century assault on Gaza before the current war. On 10 August, a day after a cop shot eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, protests began to foreshadow what we know now was a decade of uprisings against anti-Black police violence. So much of 2024 could be broken down to the escalation of the long 2014, and yet the playfulness of 

is a reminder of just how recently the scale of these world-historical disasters felt completely different: not necessarily less grave, but less doomed.

Against this backdrop, Ifekoya’s video stages an internal conflict that unfolds along at least four axes, once more (with feeling): bad news; the picket line; the studio; the discotheque. In other words, perhaps: history unfolding beneath our scrolling fingers; the necessity to organize in the face of it; the demands of work (which in this case, crucially, is artistic labour); and, lastly, pleasure, or maybe more simply, sweat, including someone else’s sweat. The ancient questions of getting through a Friday night in a late capitalist Western metropolis – questions that the very form of the music video deeply resonates with: Should I go out tonight? Can I afford to go out, in terms of workload, body battery, money? In terms of craving some time off, can I afford not to go out? In 

, Ifekoya refuses to resolve this conflict, to prioritize any of the wobbly variables in this problem in the name of hedonism, pragmatism or activism. The non-resolution that the video is propelled by is absurdly funny: are we supposed to understand that the protagonist mulling over their decision, instead of committing to either of these activities (the deadline, nightlife, strike action), is simply … procrastinating? Elaborately crafting a disco ball? Dancing and singing, yes, but 

bearing witness to the state of the world at the pace of the Facebook timeline? Procrastination as a way of holding contradictory social pressures, if for a moment, at bay?

In this context, Ifekoya’s performance style, too, is instructive: in interviews in the mid-2010s, the artist talked about wanting to refuse, in their work, the exoticized spectacle that pop culture often makes of Black dancers. Against this history, Ifekoya’s music video star offers the virtuosic 

 of pop culture’s aesthetic conventions: their dance moves resonate with a low intensity, not restrained but gleefully cool, heartfelt but not sentimental. This refusal makes the brief moment of release that pop offers in 

 feel less like a dramatically cathartic antidote to the woes of everyday life, but rather messy and tangible like everyday life itself, which is to say, more real. More fun.

In critical reception, the tone of the video has often been read as either self-flagellating (as in, ‘I should be at the picket line’) or hedonistic, but perhaps it can also be understood as cheerfully analytical. It conveys an antsy need of having to think – and dance – through the various demands, conditions and desires of the contemporary workday in relation to each other: without pitting them against each other, without simply conflating them. At the time, in 2014, artistic labour still seemed, to some, as the Platonic ideal of the so-called ‘new work’ environments that threatened to expand even deeper into personal life. Few curatorial statements could dispense with terms like immaterial labour, the entrepreneurial self, etc.The avant-garde artist abolishing the difference between work and life briefly appeared as 

paradigmatic worker. Although clearly in conversation with this discursive moment, Ifekoya’s work de-dramatizes this perspective. In 

, the artist is a worker who, like most workers, is just craving a night out.

, as Ifekoya has put it, the music video format. Other entries in the series, titled 

, explore different kinds of dichotomies central to Ifekoya’s work, playing with the paradoxical prompt of ‘trying to learn your mother’s tongue’ (Yoruba, in Ifekoya’s case) or the tension between ‘he-man’ and ‘she-male’. One can sense in these videos the urgency of what 

might have meant before, in the further course of the 2010s, the word often got turned into art writing clichés, institutional redemption arcs and, ultimately, bitter memes about the former. While the word still held some antagonistic charm and precision in 2014, it wasn’t long until we queered everything: straight culture, niche animal facts, time and materiality itself. And obviously, all these things deserve to be fucked with, radically transformed, revealed in their glitchy constructedness. Too often, though, the liberal tendencies of queer activism, theory and cultural production became dominant, setting the concept up for its simplifying abstraction until ‘queer’ became just another, supposedly more full-bodied word for ‘subvert’ or ‘do differently’. In the art world, in particular, institutions increasingly used concepts like ‘queer’ (and later, ‘care’, ‘community’ and so on) as a smokescreen for vague gestures at grandiose self-reflection, rather than actually building that wheelchair ramp, paying a better fee or – and this would have been a possibility too – actually deepening their engagement with what’s queer, irrepressibly sexual and gendered about queerness.

 describes less a virtuous act than, indexed by the curious extra ‘y’, the exploration of a surprisingly concrete angle: nightlife matters to strike action. Strike action matters to nightlife. The picket line of the intellect is dependent on the discotheque of the will and vice versa. To this day often misrecognized as being driven by ‘identity’, to radically think with queerness simply means recognizing that a ruthless critique of everything has to start somewhere, somewhere messy. And sometimes that’s precisely at the midpoint between working late and dancing so close I can feel you sweat. And sometimes that’s funny. There is a long Black and queer history of fighting for pleasure in the face of the ever-expanding workday. There is a long Black and queer history, too, of working with the knowledge that, whether we like it or not, the idiosyncratic forces of desire are not exclusive to supposedly ‘populist’ flavours of politics. 

, however makes palpable that these contradictions cannot simply be glossed over by paying lip service to how ‘pleasure is political’. They’ll have to be carefully mediated, with a wink.

Since 2014, Ifekoya’s engagement with sound has shifted as well, from the bright synth riffs of electroclash to a deeper, more immersive frequency. Their increasing interest in archival research and social dynamics has made them, in their own words, ‘disappear from the frame’ as a performer.

The collective Black Obsidian Sound System, for example, which Ifekoya initiated in 2018, is, among other things, renting out custom-made hi-fi equipment for community gatherings. The artist has described recent work like 

(2022) as ‘sacred sound installations’, in which visitors are invited to experience social energies beyond the confines of visual representation. And perhaps, one could retroactively read 

 through the lens of this framework as well. ‘Working late / the music / the bass / the bass is pulsing through.’ Like so many disco classics, that that sounds like a fun and agonizing prayer.


Biographies

Picket Line of the Intellect, Discotheque of the Will: Picket Line of the Intellect, Discotheque of the Will: On Evan Ifekoya’s 'Disco Breakdown'

Disco Breakdown

Picket Line of the Intellect, Discotheque of the Will

Nikita Gale

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

 (2022), the artist appropriates the close-up of Diana Ross performing the three-minute song of the same name from Sidney Lumet’s film 

 (1978). By obscuring Ross’s face with the insistent glare of a handheld spotlight and by silencing her voice, the emotional intensity of the performance is paradoxically heightened. Disguising Ross as the source of the song, the light accentuates those physical gestures that extend beyond the sphere of the beam: her shoulders and chest flex with effort, and the crown of her head rises from the pool of light during the song’s unheard crescendo. Rather than diminishing the emotion of the performance, Gale’s rejection of the cinematic close-up through its erasure works to defamiliarize it and disrupts a straightforward identification of the ‘representational economies’ of its Black subject in the projection of psychic pain. 

In refusing the coupling of audible voice and visible source, 

 also challenges the famous narrative denouement of L. Frank Baum’s novel 

 (1900). In that scene, the unlocatable, acousmatic voice of the Wizard – initially terrifyingly mysterious – is stripped of its mystical power by the classic curtain drop that reveals a frantic old man and, in so doing, binds an ordinary human image to the previously unknowable sound. Simultaneously rejecting what Michel Chion describes as the ‘dis-acousmatic’ gesture of a final reveal, Gale’s partial acousmatic transformation of Ross reveals her as the real source of power.

 This physical act of overexposure therefore serves as an alternate cinematic method of sorts: through projecting light onto the original footage, Gale alters the focus and meaning of what is contained within the frame.

Like Gale’s handheld spotlight, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 

 (2017) also eschews the tools of industrial cinema. Shot on a Digital Harinezumi, a ‘toy’ camera with a fixed lens that digitally produces a noisy, warm image reminiscent of the dreamlike quality of Super 8mm film, the work begins in grainy black and white, as the camera’s sensor struggles to capture a luminous outdoor cinema screen in the darkness of night. Its searing rectangular image glows and stutters as it reveals the audience – seated figures that can only register because of that dancing light. Intercut with a tracking shot of the passage down a street towards a junction, the edges of the frame lush with vegetation, the scene cuts again to the hypnotic rhythm of rolling waves as they hit the beach. A couple, unknowingly performing for the camera, watch a sunset from a balcony, each framed by a pane of a sliding glass door. As this montage cuts back and forth between scenes, a diurnal cycle progresses at different rhythms within them: as the camera travels down the street, the flash of a roadside warning sign and a fluorescent streetlight burn brighter with each repetition, etching increasingly dramatic gashes of light into the frame as the landscape deepens from day to night.

Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym describes a ‘cinematic image of nostalgia’ as a ‘double exposure – a superimposition of two images: home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, the frame breaks, or the surface burns.

 In both films, light serves as both subject and object, metaphor and language, marking time with a light itself that simultaneously creates and partially destroys the image, producing ambiguous and dreamlike meaning within the noise. These vernacular light sources expose an alternate cinematic realm of experience: the sunlight dims, streetlights pulse and streak, and the spotlight and screen burn. Boym likens a passage of Vladimir Nabokov’s writing to a film Andrei Tarkovsky ‘could have made, of sculpting in time with many reflective surfaces for the fleeing shadows. These “odds and ends of light,” this diffused lunar glow, illuminate the elusive scene of memory.’

In ‘And this I dreamt, and this I dream’, Arseny Tarkovsky, whose poetry is immortalized in two of his son Andrei’s films, describes himself as ‘Alone – among mirrors – fenced in by reflections.’ These words are echoed in 

 as a voiceover that accompanies the subconscious world of Weerasethakul’s sleeping subjects – children, adults and animals – following the landscape montage of the film’s first half. The Digital Harinezumi camera cannot record sound, but here the non-diegetic voice is gentle, meditative, and far from fearsome. In 

(2006), philosopher Mladen Dolar describes acousmatic devices in cinema: ‘The screen which conceals the voice disturbs our peace of mind, it forces us mentally to step onto the other side.’

, the visual effect of the camera sensor’s specific low-fi capture encourages this displacement, inviting us to project ourselves into the film’s illusory world. Its high-contrast saturation and choppy grain produces an image that is dappled and dreamlike – a recognizable cinema of afterimages that continue to play even after we close our eyes. Though the camera cannot record sound, the film is accompanied by a piano score composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Its initially ominous, repetitive twang unfolds into a melodic register, a series of chimerical atmospheres that provide extrasensory structure and support.

The cinema of Dolar’s acousmatic voice produces the sense that ‘we have “always-already” stepped behind the screen and encircled the enigmatic object with fantasy’.

, the removal of the voice and superimposition of the spotlight conjures its own apparitions. Evading its glare, a ghostly cast of characters from the original film begins to populate the edges of the frame. With an affect not dissimilar to Sakamoto’s instrumental accompaniment, they drift towards us, their quiet visual echo underscoring Gale’s formal gesture of temporal collapse: past with present, reality with memory, dramatization with direct action. Even in silence, the voice lingers, reflected in our subconscious all the same.

 three years after its completion by creating a soft montage of his own. Unlike 

, which involved a superimposition onto the original material, this was a juxtaposition with a new film. Now paired side by side with a sequence titled 

 (2021) – shot during the production of his feature film 

’s initial montage of road, sea and cinema, while still compressing the sunrise to sunset cycle, takes on a newly asynchronous tone. In a single take, filmed from two angles without sound, Tilda Swinton drifts from wakefulness to sleep as blue shadows gradually lengthen across the room.

, Swinton’s sleep is repeatedly interrupted by a loud sound only she can hear. This ultimate acousmatic ‘enigmatic object’ triggers a sonic quest, with its source persistently remaining invisible and off-screen. The film weaves between the psycho-acoustic, phenomenological and, finally, environmental as the protagonist embarks on her own version of a yellow brick road, driven by a desire to identify the sound – a yearning for the ultimate dis-acousmatic event, where sound and image are synced, locked in plain sight for all. Yet, as musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim points out: ‘Attending to the acousmatic question [

 But for now, stripped of direct sound, Sakamoto’s piano provides Swinton with a different kind of score. In 

 (2017–21), Weerasethakul’s land and seascapes and cinema are projected  onto her memories – evoking a subconscious – in a dreamy interval or anticipatory pause that exists outside time, like the temporal gap between seeing a streak of lightning and hearing its distant, thunderous roar.

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WangShui

Paul Pfeiffer

If the camera is the body and the lens the skin, it becomes almost entirely undetectable, as it mirrors its surroundings while recording.

From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances

(2023), the epic showdown between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao finds Mayweather erased from the footage, a ghost the mind wraps around. Pacquiao ducks and sways before an etched collective memory. His gloves cover his head. He quivers with hits from a figure we might easily fill in, or have to find a reminder of. I try to watch as many times as possible, holding off from watching the original fight. As I do so, I pay more attention instead to where my eyes tend to focus when the central drama is cut and drained from the scene. I look at the eyes of the crowd, which move together, tracking the two’s dance, narrowing at each hit. The viewer shapes her mind around a void, strays to the MOTOLITE on Pacquiao’s waistband, the blue of the MGM GRAND across the mat.

Fights of the century like this are cited as media tipping points, offering a rare convergence: dense layers of sensory, political and quasi-spiritual spectacle. This fight was wildly anticipated for years, hotly covered, watched by many millions and then debated for the decade after. Many felt the fight was five years too late past each boxer’s prime, and that Pacquiao’s technical proficiency and number of blows should have secured the win. Pacquiao – the people’s hero – sustained a shoulder injury. Any clean opposition became less clear. This was one of the few fights in which Mayweather was forced to move, duck, and run around the ring. It was unusual to see Pacquaio in as many defensive postures as offensive, ducking, stepping back, pushed, even thrown against the ropes, which the artist’s edit highlights. In this edit, 

 gets as much credit for his defensive skill, taking serious hits in the face and head that would send most to the ground. Finished. We can admire Mayweather’s ghost’s technical precision. He was strategic and bided his time, even if he was less of a showman.

The sheer weight of expectation bearing down on this fight heightens the drama of what’s unseen, namely, all the puppeteering hands pulling on lines of tension, orchestrating the scene. The dance of the two was on a set before an audience both real and imagined, against a backdrop diamond-sharp in its symbolism. Pfeiffer’s choreographed edit nudges us to hold all that is off-screen as we watch. The interruption between the image and what is expected turns us to what is not there, what is outside the frame. We orient towards what might be working beyond view. A body in motion, seen through the filter of absence, through the language of speculation, betting, through the crowd’s gaze, through our imagining and our memory of his opponent in this lucrative spectacle. We watch Pacquiao’s squints, mouthed deep breaths, his expressions of grim determination. Muscles move in waves across his back and arms with each heavier punch. The camera flips views, second to second. We drift to the crowd, to the god’s-eye view, the isometric view, to the ring mat, to the back, to the shoulders of Pacquiao. 

The whole place is silent, allowing us to concentrate. We can note the improvisational, emergent aspects of the fight; there are brief smiles, moments of acknowledgement, hugs right before the final round. There is begrudging and mutual respect, if totally different styles. And there is a deep understanding on the part of each athlete that their image, and their performance in the game, is all. Pfeiffer notes in a recent interview that he was riveted to find Mayweather owns the rights to the fight, and so likely has the highest-resolution footage.

 A direct feed into the minds of the watching.

Watching Pacquiao dodge before the ghost memory figure of Mayweather, caught from every camera angle, I am reminded of Jena Osman’s challenging book 

(2019). Osman looks so closely at the details of how cameras evolved across human history that we feel her prose start to move with the cameras. As the power of visual capture accelerates, becomes more wily and tied to technological systems that are themselves more difficult to see (beyond the interface, at work through computation, or quite literally concealed), Osman argues that we must think as fluidly, deftly, with as much skilful movement. Motion technologies have their poetry, and our best possible role given their increasing speed, scale and power is to develop a critique of the moving image that lyrically moves with cameras, asking and answering the questions their movement makes possible.

, along with other videos in the long-running 

 suite, Pfeiffer uses spatially responsive and deft, fluid editing techniques to ask for a thinking and thought that meets them in flux, cutting and moving with the eye. These works blend jump cuts, speculation and documentary not just to ‘speak to’ how oversaturation, surveillance, and economic and cultural power are managed and mediated through these spectacles. The works, through what’s in absentia, ask the viewer to turn their eye and mind beyond the frame, to poke into what is unseen and what sits right beyond. Why did we see what we saw, in this way, framed in these terms?

Collective cultural memories, like the endlessly proliferated media of a great fight, are continually reworked much like individual memories. New theories, more critical analyses of digital media and sophisticated technical systems, more savvy media literacy attuned to algorithmic orchestration attune us more to what is not seen. There’s an understanding that we need to be as much critical visual readers as readers of what is beyond the frame, as power now primarily unfolds and operates beneath or beyond the visual realm, even as visual evidence provides many sigils and clues. Our collective memories are partial, contingent and far more malleable than our externalized prostheses of artificial memory, our media storehouses, might suggest. Despite computational logic’s insistence, memories are not like files stored on hard drives, retrieved simply at will through a database, sorted in a table of contents. They necessitate retrieval, prompted by association or a trigger (a madeleine, a scent), and story and context to activate them, and active retelling. ‘We’ are collectively prone to embellishment and error in remembering, to selectively forgetting, to blocking.

As we consider the diverse dislocating formal techniques Pfeiffer deploys, I turn to the artist WangShui’s 

From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances 

(2019). In this 13-minute film, we coast in a continual motion, as though on the nose or head of a dragon, through the Dragon Gate, a famous type of square-and-curved void in massive, absolutely overwhelming high-rises in Hong Kong that dizzy the mind with their density and spectacle. Such Dragon Gates are built so ‘spirit dragons’, carrying good 

, positive, auspicious, fortunate energy, can flow easily from the tops of the hills to the sea, to drink from the sea, and return in the evening. The dragons are mythological, spiritually significant, and ‘real’ in the sense that many demigods and mythical beings are ‘alive’ in the collective imagination.

Each building’s gate implies a connection of the man-made to the sky, sea and mountains around. We listen to the artist describe themselves and collaborator Hercules, aiming their drone towards Bel-Air, a complex on the sea. We look at three dragon gates and hear the narrator: ‘Hercules launches the drone, and we watch it fly towards the first hole.’ The architectural respect for this type of urban feng shui is evident in skyscrapers across the city. Further, as we learn in the film’s story, many practitioners of feng shui – banned in the PRC in 1949 – fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the late 1960s to escape persecution. Tied to geomancy techniques, we learn, the buildings embed an ecological understanding that may not be immediately apparent but is essential to consider. A building will respond to wind, to movement in the ground, and can hardly be built well without consideration of the natural and artificial systems in motion all around.

In the film, we move along a smooth, rigorously focused motion right through the centre of one dragon gate. These gate-voids, WangShui describes, refuse monumentalism and resist ideology. We are ourselves as viewers possibly coasting on the unseen energy that would lead dragons from the mountains out into the sea. As we edge closer to the first dragon gate, we see the sea, the pink and purple and blue soft sky above it, framed by the garden walkway of the gate, which residents ostensibly can step out onto. We see tankers and huge ships on the sea. We are told the drones will likely lose reception as they pass through, so we are refused the passing through; the scene changes to a new drone shot, approaching another dragon gate. Because we never quite know if the drone, the dragon, ever passes through, a void forms further in the narrative and the imagined flow of an ancient or future dragon we might be simulating.

As we course on towards the second gate, our sense of our ‘eye’ and view, and what vantage we are looking from, and what we are, destabilizes narratively and, perhaps, mentally. WangShui describes the dragon they ‘have in mind’, which takes on their name, has no body, and is perhaps a kind of camera-like eye, shuttering, shifting between endless vantage points, generating ‘an infinite live image’ of the artist. A tired voice on the final, third drone journey expresses a mournful desire to escape the tyranny of positive images, to find an escape from fixed identity. We hear: ‘If the camera is the body and the lens the skin, it becomes almost entirely undetectable, as it mirrors its surroundings while recording.’ And indeed, this ghostly camera, impossible to see, implied and hidden away, is mythic, mythologized, the roving, hidden eye of our time. WangShui’s intentional edits turn our gaze towards what is out of frame.

As Margot Norton argues, we find that ‘the unseen, the “void,” the shifting, formless, inexplicable, and otherworldly [are] often exalted in WangShui’s work – the immaterial as primary material’.

 By speaking of the immaterial as we move towards a void, we think on myth, history, persecution, urban architecture, yes: all lenses we can read the work through. But just as important as the legible and clear ‘reasons’ for the void, WangShui argues for our consideration of system mechanics and movements beyond sight. In fact, they insist on the otherworldly, the void, that is at the centre of our own knowing, at the centre of any frantic neoliberal search to pin down identity, narrative, as a fixed set of factors. No, the artist and this work seem to say: the void and the abyss are the point, turning our thinking outward, towards the edge, towards what needs consideration.

The void, in both these works, allows us to consider other tellings, and consider the illegible, hard to narrate aspects of spectacles of power, the non-visual aspects, found around the edges of the void, in the approach 

the void. Both works refuse an omniscient and single camera gaze, moving us as viewers towards the collective nature of watching, while refusing any single, seductive ritualized viewing. In looking at each artist’s formal strategies of dislocation, roving and destabilization, we can respect their respective approaches to showing what’s just beyond the frame – politically, socially, culturally – and all we learn in absentia.

Focusing on the void, we find the disembodied, watching power right at the edge of its frame. At the edge of the void is collection, management, organized stories, coherent narratives, clear power binaries. The state, the corporation, the algorithmic media life world, the surveillant, the entire topography of power shifts in the present, a many-eyed dragon impossible to see, above the ring, coursing above the crowd. In erasing the fighter, refusing the pleasure of passing through, repeated, each time, we learn how to recognize how power – its ideology – roots in the mind. Who won, and why. The void refuses the closed story, opening up dynamic paths beyond the frame and showing the cost of ignoring what is there, waiting to be read. 

Vs. (Fight of the Century)

Extract from From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances, 2019

In Absentia

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

(2023) considers Black Queer interiority and erotics through an astral exploration of the mouth as portal. Extending their multidisciplinary practice to moving image, this surreal, cinematic portrait by Jonathan Lyndon Chase suggests the overlapping and simultaneous narratives active within psychic space, and the tensions between these potential storylines. Across scenes that layer imagery of domestic intimacies and public spaces in their hometown of Philadelphia – a playground, a pool hall, the supermarket, church – the artist remembers and reconstructs, opening windows on to the erotic and pleasurable counternarratives at play within constrained, anxious or straight-presenting settings. Musing on infinity plays and memory as a fallible loop structure, 

expands Black Queer storytelling and teases what time can do to disentangle us from our own cycles. 



I’m a huge fan of your work, so it’s amazing to have this conversation.



I’m excited. It’s been busy. We just moved our studio to a bigger space.



It’s rare to see the studio looking a certain way for longer than two months. There’s a balance of intuition, chaos and order. I’m very much into interior design and thinking of the space as being alive, a living document.



(2023) again, together. What’s the story behind it?



My first jump into video work was around grad school, and I made my first public video in 2018. I’m always thinking of different ways to communicate symbols in my work, like poetry. My work in film started with animating my drawings, but that didn’t quite work for me, and I wanted to use more of my archival material. For the show where 

, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2023), I wanted the film to be a focal point containing different symbols that show up in my larger body of work. 

is an attempt to figure out a way to make these symbols work in motion or moving image format. Making the archive of my practice accessible in different ways is important to me.

I don’t have lots of formal training with film – I’ve taken maybe one film theory class and a moving pictures class – but I love movies so very much. Also, as my work is expanding and growing, I always have the thing I’m very sure of, the thing I’m less sure of, and the thing that’s more experimental, working through the different mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, sound. Making 

was also a great learning experience and helped me to understand how all my artworks inform each other.



, but also generally, I go out in Philly (where I’m from), or wherever I am, and I take pictures of things that I find. I always have my digital camera and phone with me. Sourcing images from this found archive, I try to collage them together in a way that has a narrative but is also very open-ended, dreamlike or poetic.

is narrative-driven in that you’re seeing these everyday environments or public spaces, and then there’s another lens or framing with a person’s mouth, which is both erotic and, for some people, maybe even humorous. But I mostly equate that humour to discomfort. I’ve been reading Marlon Riggs. I also studied his film work in grad school, along with other Black Queer theorists and writers on Black interiority like Isaac Julien and Barbara Hammer, a filmmaker and photographer who made these amazing videos of queer life. While her spaces are kind of non-specific, her frame is very much focused on the body. I’m really interested in the mundaneness of what the frame can capture and also in being unapologetic.

For me, there’s an erotic component to 

 that I think is very necessary in terms of us seeing that in the world. I make my work for Black Queer people; that’s my audience and my main concern. 

is really about the interiority of the body; the corporeal, spiritual, mental and also political, these multiple functions of what a mouth can represent and can do. It gets weird in a fantastical or dreamlike way because I’m trying to channel nuanced poetics. These objects, these items come out of the body – the world that’s inside the body – and function maybe as a gag.

. I probably have 100,000 images on my phone and PC, and generally I make binders where I’ll classify things: as footballs or shoes or blue T-shirts, or people at nighttime, people in daytime, that sort of thing. Then I use all these weird and interesting apps on my phone to manipulate them and move parts around. I’m really interested in using what I would consider low or humble tech. Then I use Photoshop to layer and blend things together. In my paintings, there’s also a fair amount of layering.



I’m curious about the phone-like frame. We have many windows open at all times; these collaged compositions that we exist within are so interesting. Something super intimate can be happening on your phone while you’re in public.



I think the framing had a lot to do with knowing that I was going to show this work inside a bedroom-style installation – a very intimate, private space. 

was also shown on a television screen because I think a lot about the different ways queer people have found ways to communicate with each other over time: letters, secret meeting places, the telephone. I also remember Myspace, Xanga and other web clubs and chat rooms. I wanted the installation to have a digital but painterly feel.

The horizontal-vertical compositions allow this – like you’re holding your phone or sitting at a monitor. For lots of us, that’s how we’re able to access so much about the world and other people. We spend so much time seeing the world in this manner. It felt like the right way to depict these elements. I’m also very interested in what rectangles and squares, also in a gender-binary way, tell us information-wise, paying attention especially to the softness of the flesh versus the harder angles. Part of the fun and challenge for me is to play with formal qualities. But I also consider these compositions closely tied to my poetry and writing practice in the way that I always say: I don’t consider myself a poet; I’m a painter that makes poetry.



I’m more interested in working across mediums. It’s a love for the uncertain and experimental. I think of my videos as collage. I try to maintain an aesthetic familiar to my work, but it’s very different at the same time.



I actually do have a poem about a mouth that acted as source inspiration. I might have it … I’ll be right back.

Locked. Salt.

This poem really helped me think about how to compose the visuals for the video. It was something that I’d been sitting on for a really long time, because this stuff incubates, and I like for things to kind of spill out of the frame.



, the video, gave another form to these thoughts?



The mouth is a pleasure point and a power zone. We use our voices for great change, and it’s one of the ways we affect the world haptically. I think of people and political activists like James Baldwin or Marlon Riggs, this idea of song or chant, and these items we see in the film like eggs and carrots – things from the safe place of the domestic, where we can be vulnerable, just ourselves, and unguarded in a very tender way. These items are coming through this portal that’s within the body, that’s a pleasure point. For 

, I decided to focus on the mouth as a zone of possibility.



And yet it feels like an unexplored or lesser-appreciated zone, culturally speaking.



I agree. People get uncomfortable. That response isn’t new to me. Actually, I kind of like it because it asks the viewer to question their discomfort.

The people in the film are friends of mine, and they told me that filming it felt cathartic, relaxing and a little adventurous for them. It felt like something they should and shouldn’t be doing at the same time. There’s tension.

I think the key is to be unapologetic in showing these sorts of visuals. But of course, that’s what makes people uncomfortable. Partly I think we’re simply not used to seeing imagery like this, made by a Queer Black person. It catches people off guard. For me, making this work is also about a need and desire to have a rich and complex visual canon and the possibility of what else might be birthed from that. This idea of birth, too, is like an opening orifice. I often talk about how the skin of our lips is the same kind as our anus, and I think we also must remind ourselves that our bodies are flesh. What does that mean for how we look at reality?



Let’s look at some of the scenes in more detail.



Together, the compositions in the film exhibit a pattern or revisiting of tensions that I’m trying to push up against each other, to make something of a simultaneity where more than one thing is happening.


In the carrot scene, the drilling noise is the engine sound of motorbikes. There’s an element of freedom, danger and romance in being on a motorbike, and then that’s paired with these very sharp or phallic things being packed into the mouth. This is something that might happen where these people are going, maybe a sex party. Again, this mix of something that’s uncomfortable and pleasurable at the same time.
The candle scene talks about religion specifically. I was raised in a Baptist household, and though I haven’t been to church in years, it still sticks with me in my memory. I wanted this composition to be more vertical, echoing this idea of heaven and hell, up and down. This scene is part erotic, with the candles in the mouth, but it also relates to experiences of being silenced because of who I am as a person. This is one of my favourite scenes because it touched me in coming to terms with what spirituality meant for me at the time, and what it looks like for me now.



There’s significant labour in constructing each composition, too: going to get the eggs, sourcing the stained glass, putting things in the mouth.



Thank you for mentioning that, because increasingly through my works I’m shaping my practice as a form of ritual. It’s a process. I also consult with the performers about how the objects feel and fit in their mouth. I’ll give the object to them to get to know it. That’s part of it; the objects that are in play, and then the space that’s being charged with memory.

The basketball court scene is set in a playground in North Philly, and there’s a small, rubber American football inside the mouth. It’s a kind of surreal play on balls and masculine sport. I’m interested in archetypes and roles that are considered very macho or masculine, and the historical erasure and policing of these spaces. Especially with athletes and what’s going on in current events with trans athletes, queer athletes. There’s also this homoeroticism that comes into play with sports that I wanted to challenge. You have all these macho men playing with balls, and this is supposed to be a safe space for everyone, but unfortunately, sporting culture really promotes homophobia. There are so many people who are lovers of sports but who are alienated. Again, there’s a level of silencing regarding what sports culture could be doing to someone.

I’m also thinking about cultural conditioning or brainwashing. It starts very early, the way you’re expected to function, look and navigate through space, what’s ‘culturally appropriate’. This reflection on childhood is also why I used a toy football in this composition. I collect lots of miniatures and kids’ toys.

Also, identity and intersectionality. For many young Black people, sport is a site of power, pride and respect that goes hand in hand with ideas of masculinity. I remember growing up – and even still now – with some of my friends, the pressure or policing of certain aspects of their personality. It’s strange and violent.



We’re talking about truth and fiction, in a way – the scripts and performances that we repeat in our everyday lives versus what our interior reality or story might be at any moment. One of the defining characteristics of 

I like loops, especially because I think of memory that way. Not necessarily related to trauma, but also to happy or pleasurable thoughts that stick in your mind. That’s the mental, emotional landscape I’m talking about. Making 

, I was thinking a lot about the memory of sound, how it stays with you, which goes back to the loop. I wanted a set number of sequences and then for it to just sort of repeat. How does sound take up a space in our mind along with how something looks? I like to call it ‘being sticky’ – you hear a few quick seconds of something and then it just keeps going in your mind.



But the second repeat is slightly different. Does 

propose an undoing? In the sense that the more you repeat a pattern, the more you can register, understand and perhaps halt it. 



I really love our talk right now. When my work leaves me, or the studio, it takes on its own life and I start figuring out and learning other things about it. There’s always this question of ‘the intent’: what’s going to come across, and how much you want to direct or inform the viewer. But it mostly brings me back to the idea of bringing new possibilities to the canon of Black Queer storytelling and image-making.

