black beyond

_origins, 2021

3D Web GL, online game environment

_origins is an XR experience and new media art exhibition led and organized by artist and black beyond creative director JAZSALYN, with cocurator Shameekia Shantel Johnson. _origins is a prelude to _assembly, alchemy, ascension [a^3], serving as an ode to black femmes, women, gender non-conforming individuals and beyond.

_origins asks what is preservation? Where is restoration? How do we uplift black femmes and queer individuals alike? How do we find collective healing amidst the apocalypse? How do we reimagine mythologies to redefine our state of being? An alternate reality to reclaim our sacred energy? Where is the black femme paradise? _origins reorganizes time within the virtual space to reclaim our power through conversations, workshops, art, and sound rituals. Activating portals of embodied thinking, healing, and world-building. Within the digital realm of _origins, we explore themes such as ancestral knowledge and memory, black trans power, birthing doulaship and erotic radical resistance.

Project team members: Amron Lee, Avery Youngblood, Ege Uz, Eli Peralta, Gabe Deko, Kevin Cadena, jazsalyn, Livia Foldes, Sammie Veeler, Regina Flores Mir, Shameekia Shantel Johnson, tee topor.

black beyond is an art and new media research group developing radical interventions for art cultural workers and community organizers who are defining alternate realities for blackness. black beyond seeks to elevate a new era of the black avant garde to disrupt, decolonize and re-indigenize social structures for creative practice and beyond. As an art practice as community practice, black beyond reallocates institutional resources to underrepresented communities and allows topics surrounding emerging technology and the future to escape institutional corridors.

Follow @blackbeyond_ on Instagram and Twitter. If you’d like to help support the work of black beyond, consider donating to the platform. By doing so, black beyond can fund future programming and exhibitions for its ecosystem.

fields harrington

Redox Drip, 2019

Speakers, Nyquil, Sprite, mixer, magnetic stirrers, graham condensers, receiver, glass flasks, styrofoam cups, plastic storage bin, contact mic, plastic tubing, water, black anodized aluminum, two-way vacuum distilling adapter, angle distilling adapter, claisen adapter, two-way connecting distilling tube

fields harrington is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice considers the blurring of boundaries between poetics and science. His work revisits the history of western empiricism and scientific systems, addressing legacies of violence as well as the enmeshment of science, racism, and ideology. By appropriating scientific processes and subverting their grammar, his desire is to relieve the black subjective experience from a legacy of historical violence. fields received his BFA from the University of North Texas and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program for the 2019-2020 year.

fields harrington

Steam Economies, 2021

Privacy filter, inkjet print

fields harrington is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice considers the blurring of boundaries between poetics and science. His work revisits the history of western empiricism and scientific systems, addressing legacies of violence as well as the enmeshment of science, racism, and ideology. By appropriating scientific processes and subverting their grammar, his desire is to relieve the black subjective experience from a legacy of historical violence. fields received his BFA from the University of North Texas and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program for the 2019-2020 year.

ed-en

_in remembrance of me, ~, 2022

Mixed media

Cyanotype portrait, developed and exposed onto cotton canvas. Transparent overlay photographed on Edisto Island, South Carolina.

ed-en seeks to create celestial space — imagining a ‘no-place’ and SHELTER, for the black ensemble to project, release, and reconcile. Acknowledging notions of ritual and memory, ed-en interprets ceremonial, corporeal performance as sacred acts of resistance and preservation; to reflect and remap a fractured tradition and presence, to project an idea of a sustainable collective through space, and time.

ed-en

_shroud, ~, 2021

Textile

Extracted indigo plant pigment, stained onto cotton gauze.

ed-en seeks to create celestial space — imagining a ‘no-place’ and SHELTER, for the black ensemble to project, release, and reconcile. Acknowledging notions of ritual and memory, ed-en interprets ceremonial, corporeal performance as sacred acts of resistance and preservation; to reflect and remap a fractured tradition and presence, to project an idea of a sustainable collective through space, and time.

Jamal Ademola

I Forever Am, 2021

Triptych, three channel video installation.

I Forever Am. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Release. Picture yourself in the vast darkness of space. You're giving birth to a star. Unfoldment. Open your eyes. I am the night during full eclipse. I am the deepest indigo sky. I am the void, the unknowable, the space in-between. I am the fear that remains, forever unseen. I am the beautiful soil that pushes up the dirt. I am the darkness from which all babies are birthed. I am the words on the page. I have no beginning. I have no end. I am the first and the last. The incompressible friend. I am the spark of consciousness. I am the keeper of the flame. I am the fire that burns until nothing remains. I carry the cosmos. I hoist the sun, moon, and stars. I transplant the heavens. I shine from a far. I make mystery envy. I make intrigue quiver in awe. I am the rose that grew from concrete. I am the thing you try to mar. I am the most beautiful boogie man. The indigenous caravan. I am the history stolen. I am the thing you can't understand. I resist, I persist. My light spirals through the land. Through the tapestry of space and time, I exist. I Forever Am.

Jamal Ademola is a Nigerian-American film director, visual artist, animator and actor. Ademola poetically works across a wide range of disciplines – Live action film, animation, video, drawing, painting, photography, and performance. Across media, he builds rich, prismatic worlds that examine displaced black identities, love and relationships, social and cultural consciousness. In his work he seeks to investigate the mythical, the cosmic, the infinite, the indigenous, and the fantastical, through dreamworlds which explore the sacred power of the elevated feminine to construct a higher, more evolved society and way of being.

Ademola’s selected works are audiovisual animations and montages that explore and expand the black femme form, dreams, and myth. The futuristic quality lies in the narratives and modes of inquiry evoked in his speculative process of creating. He positions his Yoruba heritage within a global context, to design dreamscapes that allow introspection on our human experience as Black and African people.

Ademola is the recipient of the 2021-22 Kala Media Art Award and fellowship and has been awarded residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Oregon based Caldera Arts founded by Dan Wieden of Wieden + Kennedy, and Pocoapoco based in Oaxaca Mexico. In addition to his art practice, he has helped create commercials and installations for highly visible brands such as Reebok, Pepsi and Apple. His photography has been published in I-D magazine, VOGUE Italia, and VICE. He is currently based in Los Angeles and is writing and developing projects for film & television with an emphasis on diaspora healing.

JAZSALYN

REIMAGINE Prototype 002, 2020-2022

Machine learning, video, installation

REIMAGINE Prototype 002 is an ongoing computational study to re-indigenize algorithms and reimagine lost, indigenous histories and technologies. Through python code syntax, RP 002 hacks and illustrates parallels between the lost histories of black diaspora, ancient extraterrestrial civilizations and colonial subjugation. Machine Learning Video, jazsalyn. Research, jazsalyn, Zainab Aliyu. Audio, Nailah Hunter. API, NASA, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

JAZSALYN’s work begins where fiction and reality collide. As a multidimensional anti-disciplinary artist, she combines new media and community organizing to define alternate realities for blackness. As founder and Creative Director of black beyond, JAZSALYN curates a monthly segment titled 'alternate realities' on Dublab Radio and a series of public art interventions to disrupt, decolonize and re-indigenize creative practice and social structures.

Through immersive soundscapes, JAZSALYN reconstructs the intricate history of sound and performance as a technology of black transgenerational resistance. At Parsons School of Design, she expands this history through a studio course on 3D speculative design and techno origins in the Design and Technology program.

JAZSALYN is also a current member of the Extended Realities cohort at NEW INC in The New Museum. She has been featured in CULTURED Magazine, Vogue, The New Yorker, and Huffington Post. Exhibitions and panels such as the Wheaton Biennial, Abolition Planning and Afrofuturism at Pratt Institute, black beyond _origins on New Art City and Textiles as a Second Skin at MoogFest. *Her preferred name is unicase and omits last name for decolonial purposes.

Zainab Aliyu

Affirmations for My Existence, 2021

Computational sound art, website

A revisiting of a non-linear poem I wrote in 2019, reimagined to challenge established relationships between reader, text, and authorship, and to fully utilize the affordances the web offers in the presentation of text. Built in collaboration with Tiger Dingsun. As a first generation Nigerian-born American, I think about the inherent radicalism embedded in my engagement in spaces that were systematically designed to keep people who look like me away. I think about the white woman who called the cops on my sister as she was sleeping in her dorm common room at Yale, and of the history of white people leveraging weapons of the carceral state against Black people for simply existing. ⁣ I also think about my mother leaving Ijebu-ode, Nigeria for America in her early 20s so that her children could have access to the spaces that i currently occupy. And i think about the sacrifices she made in pursuit of the “american dream."⁣⁣ For my mum, Oluwaremilekun 'Remi' Aliyu and her mum and so on and so forth.

Zainab Aliyu ("Zai") is an artist and cultural worker living in Occupied Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, New York, USA). Her work is about the material affect of the "immaterial." She contextualizes the cybernetic and temporal entanglement embedded within societal dynamics to understand how all sociotechnological systems of control are interconnected, and how we are all implicated through time. She often dreams, experiments and inquires through built virtual environments, printed matter, video, archives, writing, installation and community-participatory (un)learning. Zai is currently a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation, a 2022 fellow at NYU Tisch's Future Imagination Collaboratory, directing design for the African Film Festival at the Film at Lincoln Center in NYC, and is tending to her creative practice at a collective studio warehouse named Soft Surplus.

Xavier Scott Marshall and Willy Ndatira

Genesis, 2021

Video

Genesis by Xavier Scott Marshall in collaboration with Willy Ndatira. Sound Design by CYMK. In the first book of the Bible : Genesis, God creates human beings with the deliberate intention of sharing the ordering of creation with them (1:26). Over and over again, Genesis emphasizes the peaceful origins of the world, and its innate goodness. Genesis is an experimental video which seeks to explore ‘The African American Condition’ in the 21st century via layers of digital and subliminal visual architecture. Genesis is simultaneously a journey, a puzzle and a message. The USB exhibited alongside the work may hold the answer, a virus or nothing. Its content is always altered by the artists. If you know, you know?

Xavier Scott Marshall is a first generation Trinidadian-American artist born in New York. Currently splitting his time between New York, London and Pittsburgh, Xavier’s images reflect upon interpersonal relationships while questioning the black condition through reimagined symbolism; referencing family, friends and strangers alike. Though themes range from migration in the diaspora, identity, kinship and faith; the root of his work aims to reinterpret past narratives, creating new perspectives in familiar territories.

Willy Ndatira is an artist, editor and a creative consultant who counts Gucci amongst his clients. Ndatira has also collaborated with Fantastic Man and AnOther Man as am editor, curator and a writer. Based between Johannesburg, Dubai and London, Ndatira is perhaps better known by his Instagram handle @williamcult, where he shares his visual research and discusses social issues. In 2020 his social media page made the list for The New York Times bests accounts to follow. Ndatira trained as a fashion designer, also graduating with an MA in Image Making from Central Saint Martins. He has written for titles including Fantastic Man, Another Man and i-D. In 2020 Willy Ndatira joined Fantastic Man as a consulting editor and writer.

Anastasia Warren

Palm Tray (Medusa), 2020

Ceramic stoneware

Anastasia Warren is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, ceramics, performance, and writing. These methods inform each other as they speculate the paradox of Black identity and black materiality. Warren’s practice inhabits The Afrovoid: a fictive ecology and conceptual framework which considers the contradictory immortality of black life.

Anastasia Warren

Wish Bones 1-4, 2021

Ceramic stoneware

Anastasia Warren is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, ceramics, performance, and writing. These methods inform each other as they speculate the paradox of Black identity and black materiality. Warren’s practice inhabits The Afrovoid: a fictive ecology and conceptual framework which considers the contradictory immortality of black life.

Harmony Holiday

Untitled, 2022

Framed, printed text

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker and the author of 5 collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and the forthcoming Maafa (April 2022). She curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance series at LA’s MOCA and at a music and archive venue 2220arts that she runs with several friends, also in Los Angeles. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, and a research fellowship from Harvard. She’s currently showing a film commissioned for LA’s 2020-21, and working on a collection of essays and a biography of Abbey Lincoln, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects.

Lamb

Tour 703, 2022

Video

In collaboration with ONX Studio and NEW INC, black beyond presents a physical install of Tour 703 by avant-garde, new media sound artist Lamb. Lamb performed Tour 703 during the _assembly, alchemy, ascension activation ceremony titled a^3 alchemy portal on February 3, 2022.

Ache-filled elegies, knuckle-dragging beats, and ethereal electronics comprise Lamb's singular brand of R&B, rock, and soul: where the visceral meets the cerebral. The antidisciplinary artist, born to South African immigrants, mastered a range of dance styles while growing up in Virginia. Over a decade’s worth of rigorous performance training honed Lamb’s live experience into a transcendent amalgam of song, dance, theater, and visual splendor unmatched in the contemporary underground. Invoking the works of such Black thinkers as Édouard Glissant and Dionne Brand, Lamb’s world is poetic and animate, replete with sensual matter.

Asia Stewart

No More Blue Mondays, 2020

Video, performance, iron board sculpture

No More Blue Mondays is a two-channel video that reflects on the relationship that exists between race, gender, class, and work in all of its forms including (re)productive labor, care work, and sex work. The video pairs footage from a performance in which the artist used nylon stockings to attach their body to an ironing board with selected archival clips of women making their way through an average workday at sites that include the home, factory floor, and stage. The archival clips were mainly created between the 1930’s and 1970’s and originally sourced from over 80 radio and TV commercials, etiquette videos, sex education trainings, peep show videos, stag films, oral history interviews, protest recordings, TV shows, and films stored in the US public domain.

Asia Stewart is a Brooklyn-based performance artist whose conceptual work centers the body as a living archive. After receiving degrees in the social sciences from Cambridge and Harvard University, she has sought ways to embody abstract sociological theories and transform the language specific to studies of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora into materials that can be felt and worn on the body. As a National YoungArts Winner in Musical Theatre and a former National Arts Policy Roundtable Fellow with Americans for the Arts, Stewart uses her past experiences on stage to inject her work with a heightened sense of theatricality.

In 2020, Stewart concluded her first independent performance series, Graft, which attempts to capture the violence that constructions of whiteness and femininity wrought on Black bodies. Works from that series have been showcased at NYC venues such as the Mercury Store, Untitled Space, and NARS Foundation, and will be presented in group shows at A.I.R. Gallery, Goodyear Arts, and Parsons’ Kellen Gallery in early 2022. While in residency at the NARS Foundation in Fall 2021, Stewart began to develop an interdisciplinary performance entitled Fabric Softener, which explores intergenerational trauma and Black inheritance. She will continue to refine and revisit this new work at 2022 residences that include Chateau Orquevaux, the GALLIM Moving Artist Residency, and Marble House Project.

Adama Delphine Fawundu

Deep Inside I'm Blue No. 2, 2019

Photography, textile, straw

At the shore of Freetown, and moving throughout the African Diaspora, I am thinking of the body as an archive, as memory, as a conduit of resistance and persistence, naturally free.

This performative piece includes the artist embodying an ageless being, raffia from Freetown, Sierra Leone, hair, photographs printed on silk, fabric from the artist 50 year + archive, handmade cyanotype on Guinea Brocade cotton.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photographer and visual artist born in Brooklyn, NY. Fawundu co-published the critically acclaimed book, MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. For decades, she has exhibited both nationally and internationally and is a 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition finalist. Her awards include, the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, New York Foundation for The Arts Photography Fellowship (2016) and the Rema Hort Mann Artist Grant (2018) amongst others. She was commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory to participate in the 100 Years|100 Women Project/The Women’s Suffrage NYC Centennial Consortium (2019-2021). Her works are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Princeton University Museum, Princeton, NJ; Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA; The Petrucci Family Foundation of African American Art, Asbury, NJ; The Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, NY; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Springs, FL; The David C. Driskell Art Collection, College Park, MD; and number of private collections. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.

Jazmine Hayes

Coded 1-3, 2021

Framed, debossed paper

Coded is a series of paper debossments focusing on pattern as code and systems of communication through hair braiding designs. It is an exploration of overlapping thoughts on genetic sequencing, body modification, what it means to puncture and rupture, as well as symbol and pattern as identifiers.

Jazmine Hayes is a Brooklyn born and New York-based interdisciplinary artist, muralist, and musician. She received an MFA from CUNY Hunter College and a BFA from CUNY Queens College. Through critical thought and research, Hayes explores connected histories of the African diaspora and the ways they are preserved and reproduced through cultural traditions– specifically through craft traditions. Through this exploration, Hayes works across an array of mediums such as installation, painting, drawing, performance, video, sound, textile and writing.

Jazmine Hayes

These Hands Work, 2019

Sculpture, brading hair

These Hand Works is a conceptual series of tapestries exploring pattern, coding and bonding rituals through the overlapping crafts and women’s work of hair braiding and hand weaving. I think of the relations of pattern between African textile, southern Black American quilting, and hair braiding and how these traditions have lent space for connection amongst communities of Black women.

Jazmine Hayes is a Brooklyn born and New York-based interdisciplinary artist, muralist, and musician. She received an MFA from CUNY Hunter College and a BFA from CUNY Queens College. Through critical thought and research, Hayes explores connected histories of the African diaspora and the ways they are preserved and reproduced through cultural traditions– specifically through craft traditions. Through this exploration, Hayes works across an array of mediums such as installation, painting, drawing, performance, video, sound, textile and writing.