Syllabus for Black Love
Reading List (doc)
Co-presented with PICA, jaamil olawale kosoko’s meditative multi-channel film and installation Syllabus for Black Love serves as the ship inside which the multimedia performance the hold is positioned. Through rhythmic and restorative gestures, the hold creates a perceptive and somatic experience for both performer and audience. Merging fabric, lighting, time, and sound art as sculptural material within Syllabus for Black Love, the hold is an embrace, a place, a time between time. This performance — featuring an alternating ensemble of performers/doulas—is a slippery, emerging, chameleonic practice rupturing the borders of reality, theatricality, and the digital realm. Jumping through and bending the time-space continuum, the hold behaves as both arrival and exit—a birth passage into the nuance of Black lives attempting the critical and alchemical work of self-examination, discovery, and becoming.
Artist Bio:
jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. jaamil’s practice is conceptual and process based, fluidly moving within the creative realms of live art performance, video, sculpture, and poetry. Through rooted ritual and spiritual practice, embodied poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body, kosoko conjures and crafts perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible. jaamil is the recipient of awards including the 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short film, 2021/22 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, 2020 NCCAkron Creative Administrative Fellowship, 2019 NPN Creation & Development Fund award, 2019 Red Bull Arts Fellowship, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award, 2018-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency, 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship, and consecutive 2016-2020 USArtists International Awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, their book Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, was released Spring 2022. Black Body Amnesia: LIVE, the performance reading, is a live theatrical event that examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people negotiating the psychic lifeworlds of living inside the American context. It is performed with an alternating ensemble of performers including jaamil olawale kosoko, Raymond Pinto, mayfield brooks, DJ Maij, and features original sound compositions by Everett-Asis Saunders. In this new work, kosoko uses complexity theory—which they define as the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments—as a performance device. From this artistic vantage point, the artist explores how minoritarianized communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests, and how they then archive these personal freedom narratives to subvert culturally charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure.
Syllabus for Black Love, 2022 (main install)
Installation and three-channel video with audio
14:35 mins.
Courtesy of the artist
Originally commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University and supported by the center’s Film/Video Studio
Performers: Jennifer Kidwell, jaamil olawale kosoko
Cinematographers: Ima Iduozee, Sydney Lawson
Composition: Everett-Asis Saunders
Editing and postproduction: Alexis McCrimmon
Concept and direction: jaamil olawale kosoko
Syllabus for Black Love Library, 2022 (front of gallery)
Curated by jaamil olawale kosoko
The books gathered here offer perspectives for cultivating love, specifically Black love, as an extraordinary everyday practice of being in the world. With an emphasis on feminist and queer theory, this library invites readers and viewers to engage the question: what can Black love—as it emerges in literature, films, performance, and the politics of living— teach us about liberation, freedom and beauty?
