The Showroom | Poet Julianknxx screens "Roots For A Crown" with a talk and performance

Poet Julianknxx screens his new film Roots For A Crown (2019) with a talk and performance by Musicians Thabo & Tawiah. This new work, commissioned by the Roundhouse, explores the negative perceptions and prejudice surrounding locked hair. In this imaginative docu-fiction, various storytellers delve into the symbolism and traditions behind their locs, and discuss how their hair has become an aesthetic marker of ancestral identity.

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Julianknxx is an interdisciplinary Sierra Leonean poet, broadening the boundaries and often presenting his work through installations, encompassing written word, music and visual art. He bring together the mediums of spoken word, music, and film addressing topics of diasporan identity, mental health, and fatherhood. His live gathering project julianknxx & friends is a living archive of Black British experience, exploring topics that encompass finding and communicating your voice as an artist, to navigating the multiplicity of cultures held as Africans in the diaspora.

Julianknxx in conversation with Thabo & Tawiah, performance documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada

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Thabo is a Zimbabwean-born London-based soul musician artist Thabo interest in rhythm and futurism.

Tawiah is a Ghanaian-British Alternative/Neo- soul signer and songwriter based inspired by jazz, RnB, and Gospel.

Audience, Roots For A Crown screening, event documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada

Julianknxx in conversation with curator Katherine Finerty, event documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada
Julianknxx in conversation with Thabo & Tawiah, event documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada
Thabo, event documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada
Tawiah, performance documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada
Tawiah, performance documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada
Julianknxx in conversation with Thabo & Tawiah, event documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada
Performance documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of** Prada
Tawiah, performance documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada
Tawiah, performance documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada
Thabo, performance documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada
Julianknxx in conversation with Thabo & Tawiah, event documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada
Director Elvira Dyanhani Ose, event documentation, 180 The Strand, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada

Image: Theaster Gates watching Julianknxx's, Roots For A Crown (2019), Performance Documentation, 2019. Courtesy of The Showroom

This programme takes place within Theaster Gates's installation Black Image Corporation presented by Prada, The Vinyl Factory, and The Showroom. Collective Intimacy is inspired by Gates’s ethos of collaboration and The Showroom’s commitment to togetherness and communal knowledge, taking on multiple trans-located narratives of the current Black experience as a point of departure for a cosmopolitan worldview. In response to Gates’s reactivated spaces in Chicago and how his socially engaged projects enable communities to connect and grow, Collective Intimacy aims to create a new space for people to gather, listen, converse, and contemplate amongst a fusion of art, design, music, and everyday life.

Black Image Corporation presents distinct spaces creating a myriad of possibilities for collective engagements, featuring an installation of Gates’s art objects, furnishings, and new films that capture the methodologies of urban renewal and community activation founding his practice. Pieces from Chicago imbued with powerful histories, uses, and localities resonate with distinctive lounge design from here in London – like a love letter between two cities, under the roof of a new House. Taking place at both 180 The Strand and The Showroom, Collective Intimacy hosts interdisciplinary interventions by artists, musicians, designers, writers, thinkers, collectives and members of the public, who are all invited to distort notions of selfhood and togetherness in the spirit of creating a global community.

Image: Prada