the hold, 2022
Performers: jaamil olawale kosoko, Nile Harris, Everett-Asis Saunders
Production Manager: Shana Crawford
Composition: Everett-Asis Saunders with jaamil olawale kosoko
Concept and Direction: jaamil olawale kosoko
photo by Freddy Koh
performers Nile Harris & jaamil olawale kosoko
“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.
the hold 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 gallery or theater to conjure an environment of sudden, unexpected, emotional complexity.