| Location: | Room A |
The Sierra Leonean artist Julianknxx holds his first show in Spain after exhibiting at venues including the Barbican, Tate Modern and Gagosian in London; the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon; Buro Stedelijk in Amsterdam; and Sharjah Biennial 16.
Julianknxx is a prominent voice of the African diaspora who explores themes like identity, memory and belonging through poetry, film and installation art.
Chorus in Rememory of Flight (2023–2025) is a cinematic portrait of the Black experience. Over the course of a year, Julianknxx travelled 4,000 kilometres across nine European cities with a colonial history, collaborating in each place with artists, musicians and choirs from Black communities. Through a practice of active listening, he has collected their performances, testimonies and contexts to create a series of films that reflect on the chorus as a means of resistance to the eradication of differences.
This “active listening” is inspired by African oral history traditions, whose interactions are woven together to form a chorus of individual, local and global perspectives. The result is a thrilling encounter with Europe’s past and present, and with the possibilities afforded by its future.
Filmed in Hamburg, Berlin, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, London, Marseille, Barcelona and Lisbon, the project charts a staggering 4,000 kilometres. These vast distances offer a reflection on the many kilometres travelled by those interviewed and by their ancestors throughout history. A single refrain—“We are what’s left of us”—binds the choral voices together, speaking to the ways in which music can be a vital conduit for the survival of cultural memory.
This exhibition also features a reading room, a place where visitors can rest, relax and browse through books by African and Diaspora authors that map interests, memories and stories, as well as diving deeper into a broad selection of volumes on contemporary critical discourse.
The exhibition has been co-produced by the Barbican and WePresent by WeTransfer in partnership with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and with the support of 180 Studios and De Singel.
