The Model is delighted to present Chorus in Rememory of Flight, an immersive multi-screen film installation, across six gallery spaces, by one of the UK’s most exciting artists, Julianknxx.
Inspired by the words of philosopher Édouard Glissant, ‘you can change with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself’; this major work is borne out of a year in which Julianknxx travelled to cities across Europe to locate and collaborate with ex-patriot African communities. Through a practice of active listening, he has collected the performances and testimonies of singers, poets, choirs, politicians, dancers, activists and leading figures from Black communities, to create a series of films that reflect on the chorus as a means of resistance to the eradication of difference.
Filmed in Hamburg, Berlin, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, London, Marseille, Barcelona and Lisbon, the project charts a staggering 4000 kilometres in total. These vast distances offer a reflection on the many miles traversed by those interviewed and by their ancestors throughout history. A single refrain – ‘we are what’s left of us’ – binds the choral voices together, speaking to the ways in which music can be a vital conduit for the survival of cultural memory.
Julianknxx’s films encourage new perspectives on what it means to be caught between multiple histories and places, offering up the choir as a metaphor for community. Culminating in an area for reading and reflection, the exhibition emphasises the importance of listening and engaging in alternative ways of telling the stories that have shaped our cultural identities. The polyphonic nature of Julianknxx’s work is indicative of the artist’s expansive practice, which is rooted in poetry but extends into performance, film, music and sculpture. Born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, he draws on his personal experiences to broaden perspectives on the history and culture of Africa and its diasporas.
In casting his own practice as a ‘living archive’ or an ‘history from below’, Julianknxx draws on West African traditions of oral history to reframe how we construct both local and global perspectives. He does this through a body of work that challenges fixed ideas of identity and unravels linear Western historical and socio-political narratives, attempting to reconcile how it feels to exist primarily in liminal spaces.
Julianknxx has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including solo exhibitions at CAM, Lisbon, 2025; the Barbican, London, 2023; Foley Gallery, New York, 2022; and 180, The Strand, London, 2021. His work has been shown in group exhibitions at Tate Modern, the Whitechapel Gallery, and the Gagosian amongst many other galleries.
