PERFORMANCE & FILM INSTALLATION

(chrysalis) is a hybrid live performance installation and virtual theatrical experience that uses original and found-footage, expanded cinema techniques, and queer feminist archival strategies to create participatory traces a Black past, investigating the ghostly way in which Blackness travels through digital mediums and how digitally haunts the material world as a means to examine concepts of metamorphosis, intergenerational knowledge, blood memory, and the complexities of living and dying while Black in America.

"Memoirs of a Mystical Maroon (rituals for a lost history)," draws its inspiration from Sylviane A. Diouf's impactful book, "Slavery's Exiles." This work serves as a poignant and thought-provoking ritual performance, meticulously crafted to honor and illuminate a forgotten chapter in American history. Sylviane A. Diouf's exploration of the experiences of those exiled during the era of slavery becomes a profound catalyst for this ceremony, urging a reexamination of historical narratives often obscured or marginalized.

Premiering in 2022, Black Body Amnesia (the performance reading) examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people that negotiate psychic and spiritual lifewords that exist beyond the captive conditions induced by racially reductive renderings of the African American body. It is performed with an alternating ensemble of virtual doulas including jaamil olawale kosoko, Raymond Pinto, mayfield brooks, DJ Maij, Nile Harris, KJ Wade with sound composition 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 theatrical device manifesting within the construction of the alternate ego J-Lov. From this artistic vantage point, the artist explores how minoritarianized communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests. Black Body Amnesia attempts to archive ongoing acts and while re-activating histories of black collaborative action, we find personal narratives of freedom that subvert culturally-charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure.

Staged within milieus that reflect the ancient elements—air, fire, water, earth, and spirit—kosoko’s Syllabus for Black Love is a meditative multi-channel video work that embodies the shared care and healing qualities of Blackness. From a series of conversations, an intimate portrait emerges through a poetic quest that asks “What is Black love?". Arranged as a choreo-poem, Syllabus embraces the notion of ‘doulaing’ as a practice of nurturing through rhythmic and restorative gestures. Set to an original sound score by Everett-Asis Saunders, the work captures the movement of two dancers, kosoko and Jennifer Kidwell, as they embrace and display great affection for each other, reimagining Black queer bodies in natural settings that navigate between land and sky, bonfire and ocean, turning them into sacred intimate places. 

Syllabus for Black Love serves as the ship inside which the multimedia performance installation, the hold, is positioned creating an experience that is both perceptive and somatic. An altar staging objects and materials composed from kosoko's personal performance archive is on display. Various fabric-covered floor sculptures invite one to spend time in the space.

Chameleon is an experimental visual album inspired by the radical queer feminist genre of the “Biomythography” which refers to Audre Lorde’s foundational work entitled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name published in 1982. It combines history, biography, and myth, and holds a literary perspective that serves as a guiding light for complex narrative storytelling rooted in a queer, Black self-defined, feminist imagination.

Broken into five distinct confessional/autobiographical poems: Linoleum, Stank, Entertainer, Wake, Effigy (all written by kosoko); each poem acts as a chapter depicting and rewriting specific moments from the protagonist's lived experience. In each shot, kosoko's body responds to memory, moving in and out of dream, nightmare, present practice and ceremony. The process––a necessary re-conjuring––allows past ghosts to exist alongside present reconfigurations underscoring the creative, therapeutic and sometimes necessary but painful impulses of fugitive beings to shape-shift as a measure of survival.

“The hold repeats and repeats and repeats in and into the present…” -Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being  

Meshing the performative uses of fabric, lighting, time, and sound art as sculptural material inside the context of the multi-channel moving image installation, Syllabus for Black Love, the hold is an embrace, a place, a time between time. It is a slippery chameleonic emergent practice rupturing the borders of reality, digitality, and theatricality. Performed by jaamil olawale kosoko with an alternating ensemble of virtual doulas including Everett Asis Saunders and Nile Harris, the work resists capture by jumping through and bending the time-space continuum. It behaves as both arrival and exit - a birth passage into the intricate nuance of Black lives attempting the critical and alchemistic work of self examination, discovery, and becoming.

American Chameleon: The Living Installments (2.0) is a hybrid multimedia living artwork, instigated by Nigerian-American artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, that explores the ever-evolving ways in which digitality intersects with the fugitive realities and shapeshifting principles that Black queer people employ to survive and heal. The work also operates as a digital archive, a porous public performance in interactive pedagogy where Kosoko and collaborators seek to locate a space for healing both online and off. Kosoko and collaborators will host a series of events, including a film screening, discussion, and healing session, that aims to hold grief while also centering themes of liveness, beauty, humor, care, and joy.

The work operates as a flexible, digital commons. A pop-up community of organizers and practitioners who center adaptive interactive learning as a means of creating sustainable, multi-tiered networks of care. Occurring, in part, on the gaming platform Discord, The Living Installments server features the voices of mayfield brooks, Nile Harris, Kosoko, and others. This is an experiment in creating a flexible space where Black voices feel comfortable thinking and speaking out loud. It’s a virtual venue for biomythographic* liveness conjuring chameleonic possibility and entanglement.

Chameleon: A Visual Album is a multi-media live art work that explores the fugitive realities and shapeshifting demands of surviving at the intersection of Blackness, feminism, and queerness in contemporary America. In this new work from Nigerian American artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, a melanated stage saturated in africanist texts and iconography becomes a site of ecstatic spiritual fantasy in which an ever–present quotidian experience of grief is punctuated by moments of beauty, care, and pleasure. Inspired by an on-going fascination with erotic digitality and Black diasporic spiritual practice, Kosoko uses the apparatus of the theater to conjure an environment of sudden, unexpected, emotional complexity.

“Biomythography” refers to Audre Lorde’s foundational work entitled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name published in 1982, which combines history, biography, and myth, and holds a literary perspective that serves as a guiding light for complex narrative storytelling rooted in a queer, Black self-defined, feminist imagination.

As a complement to the live work, you can listen to Kosoko's American Chameleon podcast on Spotify here.

Chameleon is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY; the New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency program; and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, in partnership with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Tanz im August/HAU Hebbel am Ufer, and NPN. New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Residency program is made possible with additional support from the Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council with special thanks to Council Member Corey Johnson, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, the Jerome Robbins Foundation, the Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Scherman Foundation, and the Shubert Foundation. Chameleon is also made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional development support for Chameleon was made possible, in part, with commissioning support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, through the Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program, as well as the Bates Dance Festival, Gibney DiP, pOndersoa, D.O.C.H., Within Practice (Stockholm), the Centre for the Less Good Idea (Johannesburg, South Africa), PassaPorta International House of Literature (Brussels), Studio 303 (Montreal), the National Center for Choreography (Akron, OH), and Red Bull Arts Detroit.

Premiere: December 2017, Abrons Arts Center

“What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death?” – Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Setting the fugitive experience afforded Black people on fire with majesty, opulence, and agency, Séancers is an auto-ethnographic performance work that collapses lyrical poetry, psychic movement forms and strategies of discursive performance to investigate concepts of loss, resurrection, and paranormal activity. Interrogating issues related to American history, coloniality, and structural oppression, Séancers journeys into the surreal and fantastical states of a Black imagination as it traverses the ‘fatal’ axis of abstraction, illegibility, identity, and gender complexity. The work locates itself inside the spiritual, emotional, and theoretical world via the live performances of sound artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste and experimental artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, with special guest theorists who will help frame the witnessing of each performance.

Released: May 2017

‘We do know, however, what blackness indicates: existence without standing in the modern world system. To be black is to exist in exchange without being a party to exchange. Being black is belonging to a state organized according to its ignorance of your perspective - a state that does not, that cannot, know your mind.... It is a kind of invisibility.

—Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery

A film collaboration with Marica De Michele tracing the making of Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s 2015 work #negrophobia. This cinematic glimpse into a singular creative process that attempts to make plain often invisible systems of power, assumptions and cultural categories through abstract, oblique, and alternative readings of society.

The film is in tandem with an ongoing and ever-shifting roundtable discussion event lead by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko. This organized discussion addresses how performance and other forms of creative practice can reimagine or reframe the world. What might queer, oblique and alternative readings of society reveal about the intricacies and multiplicities of Blackness?

Premiere: September 2015, Gibney Dance

#negrophobia examines the erotic fear associated with Black bodies inside the context of the contemporary American project. The work is both performance lecture and rituals séance. Jaamil Olawale Kosoko juxtaposes interior and exterior landscapes to expose a confessional identity-mashup where visual and performance aesthetics collide in a face-off of self-revelation, ecstatic theatricality, and discomfort.

Aggressively multi-disciplinary, the space in which the piece is performed is in many ways an installation piece itself––the audience experiences the work confronted by a shrine to dead black people and the disemboweled library of writings of black intellectuals. Revealing contradictory feelings of desire and fear, #negrophobia references issues related to grief, misogyny, trans identity, and Black patriarchal constructs of masculinity. Together with model and performance artist IMMA, and composer Jeremy Toussaint Baptiste, Kosoko presents the audience with powerfully staged bodies, forcing them to contemplate how they might also be involved in the construction of forms of racism.