Strange fruit
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Strange Fruit at Tolhuistuin is an immersive installation that confronts the afterlives of lynching, racial terror and the ongoing violence against Black bodies in Europe and beyond. Taking its title from the haunting song made famous by Billie Holiday, the work translates that history into sculptural form – suspended, weighted, marked bodies in space – asking what it means to live with these memories in the present.
The installation was animated by a live performance from Denise Janah, whose vocal and physical presence turned the space into a ritual of remembrance and resistance. Moving among the sculptural forms, Denise’s performance carried grief, anger and tenderness in equal measure, inviting the audience not just to look, but to feel and to witness.
As with much of my practice, Strange Fruit connects Black Atlantic histories to contemporary European life, using clay, form and performance as a way to surface what is usually kept out of public view. It is both memorial and warning, a space where sound, body and sculpture work together to hold the weight of what has been done – and to insist that we do not turn away.
Welcome to Kevin's World
Welcome to Kevin’s World was developed during my IFAA08 art residency with the Tamgidi Foundation in Arnhem, where I worked alongside African and diasporic artists exploring themes of migration, identity and belonging. The installation invited visitors to step directly into my visual diary – a landscape of large ceramic heads, objects and texts that hold the stories of growing up as a Black British, Jamaican-descended man in an education system and society structured by racism.
In this world, the clay heads function as griots: storytellers carrying memories of school, family, racism, resistance and Rastafari/Pan‑African awakening. Built fast and expressively, bearing the marks of blows, fingerprints and scars, they refuse smooth, decorative surfaces and instead show what it means to live with a dislocated past and fragmented histories.
Within the broader IFAA context – a gathering of artists from across Africa and Europe – Welcome to Kevin’s World positioned my experience as part of a wider Black Atlantic story. It asked audiences in the Netherlands to confront not only “my” world, but the colonial histories, migrations and exclusions that shape our shared present. The installation became both a self‑portrait and a teaching space: an invitation to question who is allowed to feel at home, whose histories are visible, and how art can be used to hold and transform difficult truths.
One Narrative
One Narrative at The Whitaker is an installation and live performance that places my own memories of British schooling alongside the wider experiences of Black children and teachers in the UK. Set within a room filled with sculptural elements and projected text, the work invites the audience to sit inside the story – not outside it.
The performance begins with early childhood memories: walking to school with my sisters on our first day, hair carefully prepared, only to have it soaked in spit as we ran the gauntlet of racist abuse; the questions in class – “Do you wash your hair?”, “Where are you really from?” – and the quiet violence of low expectations, misplacement in “special” schools and lower sets simply for being Black.
Speaking from within the installation, I draw a direct line from those early experiences to my present as a Black teacher and examiner still mistaken for the cleaner, still confronting the same attitudes in 2022. One Narrative challenges the belief that endless reports and policies are enough, arguing instead for art and non‑traditional methods that communicate feeling: what it is like to be on the receiving end of insult, exclusion and systemic racism.
The space becomes a kind of counter‑classroom: an invitation to explore “the other perspective, the other side,” and to ask what real change would look like if we truly listened to these narratives rather than treating them as footnotes.
