Join us for an evening of talks and readings staged in response to I Found Venus and She was Transsexual, a new series of works by Ebun Sodipo. Three readings will be staged in the exhibition space itself, followed by a discussion between filmmaker, photographer and visual artist fari green, and artist, poet, and performer Chloe Finlani. Each has a longstanding engagement with Sodipo’s practice and will share their interpretation of her commission for Goldsmiths CCA. Readers include artists Kumbirai Makumbe and EM Williams.
BIOGRAPHIES
Chloe AyoDeji Filani, Artist of Poetry, Performance, Black Feminism, Public Speaker and workshop facilitator. My artistic practise/poetry works with my lived experience of being a black trans woman and the broader themes of identity of power structures and finding hope in the imagination and storytelling. She has performed a dance, sound piece at Late at Tate. Performed poetics at ICA, HOME, Spoken at Victoria and Albert museum UAL, Women of the world festival with BLACK LIVES MATTER, at women of the world festival. Performed and curated an art and music event for Black women cis, trans and queer. called ‘Swaying Feels wit Blk Sirens’.
Kumbirai Makumbe is a Zimbabwean new media artist based in London. Using sculpture, audio-visual digital installation, image and video, they continually interrogate the multi-dimensionality of blackness, transcendence and ‘inbetweeness’. Their current research interrogates the condition of ‘inbetweeness’ and ‘Intertopia’, a fictitious space which Makumbe has located to be in the throat of wormholes where those with ‘translocational belongings’ reside. ‘Intertopia’ stems from and draws from the cosmology, spiritual beliefs and ritualistic practices of the Shona people from Zimbabwe and its intersections with speculative interstellar travel, trans-ness & metamorphosis.
EM is a queer non binary performer from the midlands, where they grew up with their Jamaican-Irish family. They stand for words and movements that are, in no uncertain terms:
Irresponsibly kind
Progressively unreasonable
A challenge to urgency
Intuition building
Creating common grounds that are, above all, catalysed by the energy source that is love.
