White State | Black Mind, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

The event includes a screening of White State | Black Mind, a 2017 film about the making of Kosoko’s 2015 performance work #negrophobia. In addition the evening will include a poetry reading by Kosoko as well as a discussion with KST Senior Producer, Ben Pryor.

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.

‘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

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian American performance artist, poet, and curator originally from Detroit, MI. His creative practice draws from Black study and queer theories of the body, weaving together visual performance, lecture, ritual, and spiritual practice. Recent awards include a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2019 NPN Development Fund Award, and 2019-21 Movement Research Artist in Residence. He is the author of two chapbooks: Animal in Cyberspace and Notes on An Urban Killfloor. His poems and essays have been included in The American Poetry Review, The Dunes Review, The Broad Street Review, among others. Visit jaamil.com or follow @chameleon_coalition.

The Show Must Go On(line) is made possible thanks to generous support from the Benter Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Opportunity Fund, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and an Anonymous Foundation