20 November 2020
Online
Poet, performer, model and trans visibility activist Kai-Isaiah Jamal and artist Rene Matić contributed to our #almanaccare series with an online conversation addressing how the urgencies and circumstances of current times informed their practices.
Kai-Isaiah Jamal is a spoken word poet, performer, model and trans visibility activist. Their work draws on their own personal experiences as a trans person of colour dealing with dysphoria, displacement and uncertainty– unraveling huge, universal themes through the lens of poetics online and in physical institutional spaces. Kai was invited by curator Louise O’Kelly to partecipate at the DRAF’s take over of Ministry of Sound for London’s 2019 Frieze Week. Named ICA’s first ever Poet in Residence Kai has been recognised by some of the UK’s largest artistic institutions. They work closely with The Tate, The Freeword Centre, The Barbican and The National Gallery, democratising the artform of poetry and ushering in a new more diverse and intersectional audience who might previously have not felt welcome in those spaces. Using their artform as a means of breaking down barriers and infiltrating previously closed-off spaces is at the core of their activism. Kai’s hopes to also bring a visibility to non-binary, trans and queer communities, people and identities who have often been erased from mainstream culture. Their voice, while heavy with the weight of being a marginalised body in today’s society, is also irreverent, joyful, hopeful, inspiring and evidently, infectious.
Rene Matić is an artist currently working in London. Their work brings together themes of post-blackness, glitch feminism and subcultural theory in a meeting place they describe as rude(ness) – bringing to light (or dark) the fated conflicts and contradictions that one encounters while navigating the world in a body like their own.
Matić’s research reaches back to post-war Britain and the survival tactics and ‘tap dances’ of Britain’s Brown babies. They take their departure point from dance and music movements such as Northern soul, Ska and 2-Tone. Matić’s current work predominantly explores the Skinhead movement, its founding as a multicultural marriage between West Indian and white working-class culture and its subsequent co-option by far-right white supremacists. They use this as a metaphor to examine their own experience of living in the Black British diaspora, to excavate white jealousy, the continued legacy of colonialism and the fear of a Black planet - all things which find convergence within and upon their mixed-race identity.
The project is supported by Arts Council England Grants for the Arts.
