JESSICA KARUHANGA

2020

Oct 2

being who you are there is no other, 2017
2-channel video installation
15:00
Director: Jessica Karuhanga
Director of Photography: Serene Husni
Assistant Camera: Aaditya Aggarwal, Xin Liu
Editor: Serene Husni
Choreography: Jessica Karuhanga
Original Music: Joyful Joyful (Cormac Culkeen and Dave Grenon)
Audio Mix Track: Jessica Karuhanga
Mastered by Erik Culp
Performed by Jessica Karuhanga and Ahlam Hassan

131 Victoria Street

Incorporating her background in dance and choreography, Karuhanga engages with her body and the bodies of other Black women as a gesture of empowerment and a critique of the Black body as entertainment. Her work offers meditations on the geopolitics of Blackness. In her 2017 video installation being who you are there is no other, Karuhanga subverts common associations with Black bodies and the urban landscape by positioning herself and her collaborator Ahlam Hassan within a pastoral natural landscape. Their brightly coloured hair and clothing and rhythmic flowing movements appear in synch with their surroundings and connected to the landscape. Through the inclusion of Black women within nature, Karuhanga recognizes the absence of the Black female body in representations of the Canadian landscape and creates space for Afro-Diasporic alterity. She asks, "Who gets to experience, witness and revel on the earth here? In what ways can Blackness as urbanity be called into question?"

Working primarily in video, installation and performance, Karuhanga builds community through her projects and shares her artistic agency with collaborators so that a conversation can happen. Karuhanga’s practice synthesizes and aestheticizes the performative image as an act of resistance and resilience. Presented as a continual loop, being who you are there is no other enacts a spiritual dimension of time unfolding through ritual and improvised movement. By showing two videos in an immersive installation she implicates the body of the viewer as well. The wildness and vacancy of the site where the work is installed conveys spectral traces of what may have once been and speaks to the way history leaves a mark on the present.

Jessica Karuhanga is a Canadian Ugandan-British artist whose work addresses issues of cultural politics of identity and Black Diasporic concerns through lens-based technologies, writing, drawing and performances. Through her practice she explores individual and collective concerns of Black subjectivity – illness, rage, grief, desire and longing within the context of Black embodiment. She has presented her work at The Bentway, Toronto, Ontario (2019), Nuit Blanche, Toronto (2018), Onsite Gallery, Toronto (2018), Museum London, London, UK (2018), and Goldsmiths, London, UK (2017). Her writing has been published by C Magazine, Susan Hobbs Gallery and Fonderie Darling. She has been featured in AGO's Artist Spotlight, i-D, DAZED, Visual Aids, Border Crossings, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, filthy dreams, Globe and Mail, and Canadian Art. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Western University, Western, Ontario and Masters of Fine Arts from University of Victoria, Victoria, BC. She lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

https://www.jessicakaruhanga.net/