The voice is a powerful weapon for Sierra Leonean artist Julianknxx. And in ‘Chorus in Rememory of Flight’, he’s assembled a whole arsenal. The three films here are filled with countless voices, all brought together into a chorus and singing as one.
For his Curve installation, he travelled across Europe recording songs, dances and testimonies by Black singers, activists and performers and then weaved them all together with his own poetry to create a trans-continental chorus, a visual and sonic portrait of Black Europe.
The films take in ideas of diaspora, colonialism, survival and oppression. The voices he records talk and sing about shipwrecks and airplanes, colonial atrocities and slavery, movement and migration, pain and healing. The figures sing in Dutch housing estates, talk in Portuguese living rooms and libraries, perform in Spanish apartments and on the banks of English rivers. All these voices have different accents, different timbres and tones, but they are still European, still Black, still human.
This is the chorus as a metaphor for community, for history, for healing
It doesn’t always coalesce into something tangible, though. At points, it’s a jumbled mess. It’s all full of mixed metaphors and awkward phrasings. The two shorter films don’t work especially well, while the longer one drags and jars, and do we really need another exhibition with a patronising reading room at the end?
But in its best moments, all these clashing elements come together into something powerful, and often quite beautiful. A group of young singers almost chants the phrase ‘We are what’s left of us’ as a mantra, over and over, the volume rising, bass swelling behind the voices. A choir dressed in red echoes the phrase on the banks of the Thames. It’s poignant, moving, direct.
Julianknxx presents Black identity as a splintered, multifaceted thing, split across countless towns and countries. But not so fragmented that it can’t find a common voice and sing from the same hymn sheet. Regardless of the pressures of society, of injustice, of history and exclusion, whether you’re Gambian or Dutch, all your different voices can still come together as one. This is the chorus as a metaphor for community, for history, for healing, and for how we are infinitely more united in our differences than divided by them.
