ART CITIES:Athens-Khalil Joseph
Kahlil Joseph keeps a determinedly low personal profile, preferring that his work does the talking for him. His body of work falls somewhere between music videos and short films. In music circles, he is best known for producing pieces that violate just about every rule of the music video: There are no choreographed dance sequences, no jiggling backup dancers, no literal interpretation of the lyrics. Instead, there is simply a mood and worlds where strange things happen.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Bernier/Eliades Gallery Archive
In his first solo exhibition in Europe at the Bernier/Eliades Gallery in Athens, the artist presents three films: “m.A.A.d”, “Until the Quiet Comes” and “Wildcat”. The approximately 15-minute-long “m.A.A.d.” is set to songs from Kendrick Lamar’s revered 2012 album “good kid, m.A.A.d city”. The camera gracefully travels through a public pool where teenagers sun themselves on hot concrete, to a house party where a baby sleeps on a red sheet under a yellow blanket. Joseph wanders across a hair salon’s worn linoleum floor and lingers on a close-up of a young man’s heavily tattooed face. Then there are the moments of magical realism, like when the bodies of young men hang like bats from street lamps and storefronts. At one point a car pulls up for a drive-by casket viewing. The video evolved from a short film into a two-screen video installation in 2014 exhibited during The Underground Museum’s group show, “The Oracle”. “Until the Quiet Comes” (2012), is an arresting, visually sensuous portrait of life in one of LA’s most well-known housing apartment complex, Nickerson Gardens, with strong relationship to African cosmology. The oblique narrative created by this film sequence underlines how closely death dwells with life, and tragedy with ecstatic joy, under the constant reminder of police helicopters as ubiquitous as the summer sky over the complex. Formerly known as Wildcat, the majority African-American community of Grayson, Oklahoma, has a longstanding legacy of cowboy culture that dates back to the earliest years of the 20th Century. “Wildcat “captures the rodeo lifestyle of real Grayson residents, while inserting dreamlike visions of a young girl clad in white. She embodies Aunt Janet, one of the founders of the Grayson rodeo, who died shortly before the film’s release. Director Kahlil Joseph says that Wildcat is “an experiment inspired by the composition and performance of jazz music”. Its non-narrative form allows for a fluid experience that takes the viewer from barrel racing and bull riding, to drives along countryside vistas and small town gatherings. The film’s black-and-white imagery is complemented by a meditative score by the experimental hip-hop musician Flying Lotus.
Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 11 Eptachalkou Street, Athens, Duration 24/11/16-5/1/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:30-18:30, Sat 12:00-16:00, www.bernier-eliades.gr
