Darryl Daley is Now Gallery’s 2023 Young Artist Commission and the cutting-edge Greenwich Peninsula showspace has been transformed into a chasm of memory, intergenerational impressions and ruminations, with a quartet of contemporary cinematic works, all by Daley, that will be on display for the next two and half months.
Fact Residency: Julianknxx
Fact Residency: Julianknxx
Julianknxx traces an expansive and ongoing conversation between the many voices, past and present, that make up the cultural patchwork of his life.
In her beautiful and devastating 2016 book
In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, scholar Christina Sharpe delivers a stark rallying cry: “We must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work.” Drawing inspiration and strength from Sharpe’s words, interdisciplinary poet Julianknxx brings together sound, image and performance in a discursive, enfleshed poetic practice. His work is deeply connected both to the foundational stories and languages of his birth place of Freetown, Sierra Leone, and to the sounds and voices of his current home in London. It is the passage between these places, and their twin histories of conflict and colonialism, that the poet seeks to document, penning what he calls a “history from below.”
Julianknxx Presents: Black Room
Julianknxx Presents: Black Room
Julianknxx and Darryl Daley explore the connections between Brutalism and Black bodies.
In Black Room, Julianknxx turns his attention to the history of Brutalist architecture, as well as its inextricable links with the history and experience of Black people living in Britain. Considering what he terms “hyper-organised living” in the city of London, the poet explores what it means to live and breathe in buildings such as Trellick Tower, Balfron Tower and Grenfell Tower, buildings he understands to symbolise a certain disconnect between Black bodies and the natural potency of the earth. “When you look at those spaces in terms of survival, what it means to live a healthy life, that connection to earth, it’s just not attainable,” he says.