Julian Knox has been reading about prisons. “I was trying to find a language for the interior world,” he says. “I read about a test they did. Where there were prisoners that swear a lot, it was because they didn’t have a language for the things they were saying.”
Born in Sierra Leone, the artist, who works as Julianknxx, fled the country’s civil war with his family in the 1990s, at the age of nine, finding a home in Gambia before arriving in London as a teenager. We are speaking in Sligo on the eve of the opening of his astonishing work Chorus in Rememory of Flight, and it is hard even to conceive of a language for all he has seen, thought and imagined.
Take Sierra Leone itself: it is a country where more than 20 languages are spoken, including, overarchingly, Krio, an English-based creole. A former slave-trading station, the capital, Freetown, was set up in the late 1700s by freed slaves.
The usual colonial arsenal of tricks followed: take a country or region, pillage its resources, destroy its community and political structures, rewrite its history in a way so twisted as to make all this seem reasonable, then bewail any later lack of stability.
Julianknxx found his own voice first in poetry and now in a blend of poetry, art, music, film and performance. “I wouldn’t say I switched,” he says. “I wanted to layer multiple ways into looking at Sierra Leone. I find the visual references that were there [for it] were more what the media shows. So if you read a poem and leave it to people’s imagination, it’s quite limited to what they see. So I made a film as an anchor to the poems.”
The poetry had come while studying at Waltham Forest College, in east London. Like many exceptionally intelligent and creative people, Julianknxx was both misunderstood and frequently bored. When he arrived from Gambia, the college assessors hadn’t trusted his grades.
“‘How do I know you didn’t make these up? How do I know you’re not a child soldier?’” he was asked. “I think he wanted to make a joke,” the artist says drily. “I think I leaned into poetry because it was like a way to quiet my mind.”
The combination of poetry, music and film allows for ideas, senses and emotion to creep through in the gaps, where words aren’t quite capable of the work. This, as so many know, is about finding a way to communicate what you can’t articulate, all the more significant as a language itself is lost.
Julianknxx’s film In Praise of Still Boys, from 2021, explores his return to Sierra Leone after two decades. Suffused with blue, the film is a meditation on the sea, the wisdom of elders, and the boys he meets, who could have been him.
“In Praise of Still Boys is made for these boys. It’s made for me when I was 15. Back then being in art spaces wasn’t a thing. I didn’t know I was going to be an artist. I only understood art from a western perspective,” he said at the time.
That idea of perspective is vital to his work, and should you think that something to do with Sierra Leone, or with postcolonial black experience, may have nothing to do with you, it would be to miss a fundamental point: this work is about humanity, and every single one of us is both implicated in and affected by the threads of its stories and meanings.
[ Former child soldier turned literary sensation returns to Sierra LeoneOpens in new window ]
As I watch the multichannel film, then wander other galleries at the Model to see longer passages based on the different segments, I feel a sense of falling out of a set of certainties and into an openness, through which the vast potential of the world and its myriad peoples extends.
And while the artist’s encounters, filmed across nine European port cities – Lisbon, Hamburg, Berlin, Antwerp, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and London – are with black residents, it is a global story of people, trade, slave trade, settlement, resettlement and, most crucially, humanity.
Anger, or rage, for me is an indicator that something is not right. So the work is about how we dream up a new way of living, a new way of seeing, another way of coming into this dialogue
— Julian Knox
It is a story that has resonated: the artist’s works have been shown at Tate, at the Gulbenkian and Gagosian, and other major spaces across Europe. The Model’s director, Emer McGarry, saw Chorus in Rememory of Flight at the Barbican, in London, and knew she wanted to bring it to Sligo, to run over Africa Day on May 25th, alongside Marianne Keating’s new film, No Irish Need Apply, about the realities of Irish migration to England during the 20th century, which the Model commissioned for Sligo’s municipal Niland collection of Irish art.
There are episodes of great beauty in Chorus in Rememory of Flight, but there are also occasions for anger and despair: a dancer shimmers at the water’s edge in Marseilles; a group sing in a livingroom, bringing the accumulated truths of hundreds of years across time through harmony.
But there are also ignorance, exclusion and prejudice. “In Germany they really say, ‘Africa, the continent without culture’,” one woman says. But, as Julianknxx reminds me, she also says, “If we don’t unlearn racism, we might miss the love of our lives.”
I ask him about anger, and he smiles. He smiles a great deal in conversation, and he has an utterly engaging energy, as if he can hardly contain the joy of being able to communicate in art, although there is an added hint that this is also perhaps a defence against the underlying shynesses of a child uprooted again and again.
“Anger, or rage, for me is an indicator that something is not right. So the work is about how we dream up a new way of living, a new way of seeing, another way of coming into this dialogue. It’s not refusing to talk about it, but there are other ways we can look at this.”
When you think about love, he says, “it’s not just the romantic relationship but all the other ways that we can miss out on being loved, or loving or learning from other people. If I allow my prejudice to stop me from engaging, it’s not that I’m stopping something, but I’m also losing something.”
Looking at some prejudices through this lens, ideas about “dominant” cultures become extraordinarily crass. I think of some of the things I learned at school, for example about Picasso’s “discovery” of African sculpture in the early 1900s, as if it took a European eye to make it meaningful rather than “primitive”.
Criss-crossing Europe, and finding participants through word of mouth, Julianknxx allowed their “encounters” to lead the piece. One artist in Lisbon asked to be filmed as she slept, because, she told him, “I’m tired of talking about blackness and want to rest.”
“It’s hard for me to write my history,” he says, “when my history is being told by the oppressor.” Instead, it is to be found in fragments and traces, songs and movement.
Movement is important, and there are extraordinary sequences of dance across Chorus in Rememory of Flight. “I have to trust the body. Our postures betray us. The memory in my body. It’s in our DNA, you know,” he says, describing the “deep work of finding what my body is actually saying”.
There is a great deal there. “You go through war, seeing death – that trauma never leaves you.” He pauses, his arms coming to cradle his torso. What is he thinking of, I ask. “I don’t want talk about that.”
As we sit, the peacefulness of the quiet afternoon settles around us. Did Brexit unleash a greater racism? No, he says. It gave permission for voices that had already been there to become loud. The thing is, we all have different impulses contending with one another in our heads.
“What scares me is that good people have the potential to do really bad things. As a kid I learned that evil might come from the most unexpected places. We all have the potential to be like that if we are scared.”
The most dangerous people are frequently those who are utterly convinced of the good of their own rightness.
To watch Chorus in Rememory of Flight is to become immersed in a landscape of beauty, joy, pain, rage, celebration, injustice, ignorance, power and unexpected glory, almost drowning in it all, before coming up dancing to see the world anew. Lines from songs remain in my head: “thousands of hands will catch my soul …”, “we are what’s left of us …”
Days later, I’m still parsing it. We are the remnants of our pasts, part of the displaced fragments of peoples, or saddled with false certainties of arbitrary global “centres”, but we are also all that we choose to make of what remains to us: we are our choices, our openness, our kindnesses. We are our own hope.
As I leave, I ask the artist, after all his years in London, what language he thinks in. “English?” he says, after a pause. “But in my head I sing in Krio.” He smiles at the thought.
Julianknxx’s Chorus in Rememory of Flight and Marianne Keating’s No Irish Need Apply are at the Model, Sligo, until Saturday, June 21st
