I was her and she was me and those we might become by Kitso Lynn Lelliott | Exhibition Catalogue by ROOM Gallery & Projects

GALLERY & PROJECTS

KITSO LYNN LELIOTT I was her and she was me and those we might become 0 4 .0 9 .2 017 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 5 .1 1 .2 0 17

// EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

Kitso Lynn Lelliott I was her and she was me and those we might become 04. 09. 2017 – 5. 11. 2017

ROOM is pleased to announce the solo presentation of a multimedia body of work by Kitso Lynn Lelliott, titled I was her and she was me and those we might become. The selected video and installation based artworks elaborate on the artist’s interrogation of the philosophical underpinnings and ontological construct of race that emerged during the European Imperial era, which in turn have resulted in the production of an ”Othering” using hegemonic colonial languages. Lelliott’s research further delves into the perpetuation of idea of “racially marked beings” with the associated violent omissions, erasure and deletion of knowledges carried in diverse languages. The artist explores her contestation of these predominant narratives utilizing the language of the ghostly to allude to a sense of simultaneous presence and absence of elided knowledge and histories. By making the processes of erasure visible she achieves this by referencing history, imagining, mythology, memory and a multitude of ancestral histories, thus utilizing a multi-epistemological approach to knowledge in relation to de-colonial accounts of history. The project has taken shape around and in relation to the many places. Kitso Lynn Lelliott has shown her work in and ‘interfered' with – ranging from slave castles to auction blocks to modern metropolises forged through coloniality. She states: I have been curious about offering back these enunciations as a series of installations/interventions in response to space and narrative and tracing a dialogue as it develops. It is an experiment towards aesthetically and theoretically denying the stilling rigidity of the monologue of authoritative enunciation while becoming self/other through dialogue. It is a gesture to reclaim an agency to articulate the narratives that make us, through dialogue that is always in flux, so they might produce a shape we see fit for ourselves. Visually the work I was her and she was me and those we might become takes on these ideas by articulating the concept of Sankofa (An Adinkra concept loosely meaning one has to look back from where they came to see where they are going) through the use of tools and resources of the internet age while privileging Sankofa as a concept located in an African Adinkra knowledge system. The work speaks to ideas pertaining to movement and migration of overlapping imaginaries and identities using imagery that locates it in relation to this idea of ‘deep time’ while the method relies on most contemporary of mediums. It is a gesture towards how we, individually and collectively, personally and culturally shape shift as our world shifts. As we are constantly becoming in communication and in translation with those we inevitably come across in those cross currents of time and space, the work produces and functions at that intersection of temporal and spatial [the Place] of becoming imaginatively and in relation where there is an agency to orchestrate the things that make us.

I was her and she was me and those we might become (Video Still) 2016 Single channel HD Video 20’ 02”