The Inside Story of Black British Queer Pioneer, Ajamu X
CL Mayers has an audience with Ajamu X, the underground artist and archivist, who has an exhibition and book both around the corner
February 08, 2021
Lead ImageAjamu X, Circus Master Series, 1997Courtesy the artist
DICKPRINT editor, CL Mayers, spoke with Ajamu X for the magazine’s inaugural issue back in 2019. Published online for the very first time, with updates on his latest exhibition Ajamu: Archive Sensoria
, he speaks with Ajamu X about founding the Black Perverts Network, kink and fetish within the Black queer community, and his upcoming fine art book Ajamu: Archive.
Featured in Ajamu on the Pleasures of the Darkroom
In his home studio the artist explores pleasure, privilege and how ‘through our body, we bring our archives’
Ajamu is many things: photographer, archivist, sex activist, filmmaker, elder, Trekkie. Since the 1980s, he has sought to use sensuality and desire as methods to play with fixed notions of the self and bounded understandings of the body. ‘If people come and think Ajamu’s work is simply about identity and representation,’ he reflected in his studio in Brixton, south London, ‘then they haven’t engaged with it.’ ‘The work of Black and brown artists often gets locked down into a discussion of social and cultural identity,’ he continued. The artist uses sensation and sex to bypass these conversations, drawing on the history and process of photography to explore ‘what I want to do and what I want to have done to my Black body’.