WHITE STATE | BLACK MIND

White State | Black Mind, 2018, film, 19:26 minutes. Shot in Amsterdam, NL

“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 led 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?

People

jaamil olawale kosoko
Marica De Michele

Past Screenings

July 31, 2020
Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh, PA
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October 18, 2018
Presented by 939 Gallery, Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival, Los Angeles, CA

April 13, 2018
Presented by ArtEZ Arnhem in collaboration with DAS Theater, Arnhem, Netherlands
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2018
Presented by PPC Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany