- 16 May 2025
- 5:00 – 7:30 pm
- 'I was her and she was me and those we might become (2017)'
- Paul Mellon Centre
What is Research Now? presents a full year of programming around interconnected strands that ask us to think more curiously, critically and open-endedly about the role and practice of the arts.
The theme is led by the question: Can research in the arts enable us to live and better inhabit the world together?
It will bring artists, curators, writers, scholars and thinkers from a range of different backgrounds to think together through lectures, performances, conversations, and hands-on workshops at the Paul Mellon Centre in London.
In May, events will explore interconnected strands:
'Ongoing Colonial Worlds' asking what research is under conditions of occupation and unrest
'On Looking' show us that how we look changes how we understand the world around us
Join us for a performance and Q&A with Kitso Lynn Lelliott and Huda Tayob.
17.00–18.15: Performance and Q&A | Chair: Huda Tayob (Royal College of Art)
18.15-18.30: What is Research Now? Final Thoughts
18.30–19.30: Drinks Reception
Kitso is curious about a sensibility captured in Fred Moten’s consideration; “walking in another world while passing through this one”. She will present work that thinks through my preoccupation with the erasure and truncating of Black subjectivity, looking for modalities for articulating the complexities of Black subjectivity that has been denied its histories, humanity and “Being”. She plays with the idea that, as a marginalised subjugated being, one inhabits multiple/simultaneous realities with the possibilities of navigating across them. Kitso thinks of the “complex personhood” of the subjugated as a ghostly haunting presence when viewed through a hegemonic lens that edits their humanity.
However, beyond the bounds of the hegemonic there are other worlds, epistemies, cosmologies and ontologies that can and do recognise their “envisioned self” that is elided by authority. She'lI draw on the potential of this “multidimensional” perception of the suppressed. She thinks through how site/place/history might “appear” when mediated through the eyes of the ghostly others towards narrating a fragmentary impressionistic [hi]story. She is interested in charting flows across time and space (forced, restricted and otherwise) that shape our sociohistoric reality through this viewpoint, developing a visual language for thinking through the hauntings that trouble a “reality” which emerged in “the wake” of chattel slavery and the slippages beyond it, seen through the lens of “Black Light”.
In this video Lelliott sits with the ghost as she shifts form and is in ever changing formation, negotiating presence and marking the thresholds to the many worlds she traverses.
Image credit: "I was her and she was me and those we might become" (2017). Photo: Department of Essonne / Henri Perrot.
About the speakers
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Kitso Lynn Lelliott’s practice moves between video installation, film and writing. She is preoccupied with enunciations from spaces beyond cognitive power and the crisis such epistemically disobedient articulations cause to hegemony. Her work interrogates the “real” as it is shaped through contesting conciousnesses, their narratives and the form these took across the Atlantic during the formative episode that shaped the modern age. Her work is an enactment of articulating from elision and between historically subjugated subjectivities, privileging South-South relations in respect of imagination and knowledge yet unmediated by the Global North.
In 2017 she was laureate of the Iwalewahaus art award and was a featured guest artist at The Flaherty Seminar 2018. In 2019 Kitso-Lynn won the NIHSS award for best visual arts. She was a postdoctoral fellow and artist in residence with the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape and artist in residence with the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in 2019. She was with the CHR until 2022 when she took up a senior lectureship with the University of the Witwatersrand and was recipient of the biannual Henrike Grohs Art Award in 2024. She will be taking up an artist residency with The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York in summer of 2025.
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Huda Tayob is a South African architect, architectural historian and theorist. Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures, architectural ghost stories and working with archival silences in the built environment more generally. It also highlights the African continent and south-south connections, as sites from where we might rethink architectural cultures. She has been a Mellon Fellow on the Canadian Centre for Architecture project, Centring Africa (2020–2022), a Graham Foundation Grantee holder (2023; 2022) and received the Scott Opler Emerging Scholar Award (2019). She is co-curator of the open access curriculum Racespacearchitecture.org and the lead curator of the digital exhibition, Archive of Forgetfulness. She was a participant in the 18th International Architecture exhibition in Venice (2023) with a project titled Index of Edges, which traces watery archives, methods and stories along East African coastal edges from Cape Town to Port Said.