Parade 2022
Jelili Atiku
Intersect with Jelili Atiku
INTERSECT SERIES GATHERING #4 WITH: JELILI ATIKU This event is BSL interpreted.
Deptford X and LADA are delighted to invite you to join an intimate conversation with Nigerian multimedia artist, Jelili Atiku; Barak adé Soleil, Co-Director, Live Art Development Agency (LADA); and Dr Jareh Das, Deputy Director, Deptford X, about the processional work ’The Earth is a Beehive’ he is producing for this year’s Deptford X, festival within the context of his wider practice.
The event is part of LADA’s Intersect gatherings; offering insights into live art practices and culturally resonant work that centres locality & community, and the Festival Commission’s programme for Deptford X 2022.
The Earth is a Beehive takes place at 12pm on Sunday 25 September. Itis a processional work for the Deptford X Parade responding to the locality and context of Deptford, with a focus on its multicultural high street and market as a site of confluence of colonial and post-colonial legacies. Jelil Atiku references an African proverb that states ‘The earth is a beehive; we all enter by the same door but live in different cells.’ There are multiple meanings to this proverb, and in this context it reflects the energy of Deptford where different global ethnicities live and flourish. The parade incorporates natural and found materials from Deptford Market. Together with Lewisham’s local schools and communities, Atiku leads this processional performance, unifying young community members as they walk together collectively as a body of people, embodying coming together for a love of Deptford.
Intersect is LADA’s newest series of gatherings, making space for creative communities to share insights into embodied practices that reflect intersectional ways of being. Affirming the “liveness” of the process, each gathering is unique, allowing for the featured participant(s) to co-design how they might imagine what the exchange with those who attend may look like: an embodied dialogue between artists; a sharing of a new experimental work in progress witnessed virtually and/or in-person; or an open forum where key research questions of interest are explored and discussed.
Accessibility
- BSL interpretration: Sumayya Si-Tayeb
- Relaxed space: respectful of relaxed protocols, this is a sensory friendly environment
- Audio description offered throughout the gathering
- The gathering will be audio recorded
- Break: small break within the gathering
- Amplification: microphones
- Wheelchair accessible space
Jelili Atiku: Jelili Atiku is a Nigerian performance artist with political concerns for human rights and justice. Through drawing, installation, sculpture, photography, video and performance (live art), Jelili has put his art at the service of the prevailing concerns of our times. He is presently the artistic Director of AFiRIperFOMA– a collective of performance artists in Africa; and Chief Coordinator of Advocate for Human Rights Through Art (AHRA). He is 2015 Prince Claus Laureates and was wrongly accused, arrested, detained in prison and trialled on the instance of his performance in public space in 2016. He was artist in residence/assistant professor at the Department of Africana Studies/Brown Arts Initiative in Brown University, Providence, USA in 2018.
Barak adé Soleil: Barak adé Soleil has contributed to the international contemporary arts scene since 1991. An award-winning artist, curator, and facilitator, adé Soleil bridges the lived experience of being Black, queer, and multiply disabled with traditions from the African diaspora, access aesthetics, and postmodernism to create multilayered embodied works and cultivate stimulating global conversations. Barak currently serves as Co-Director of the Live Art Development Agency.
Dr Jareh Das: Dr Jareh Das is a researcher, writer, independent curator and (occasional) florist who lives and works between West Africa and the UK. Her interests in (global) modern and contemporary art are cross-disciplinary, although her understanding is filtered through the lens of performance art which informs both her academic and curatorial work. Das is the Deputy Director of Deptford X.
Image credit: Intersect with Jelili Atiku, in partnership with LADA. Deptford X 2022. Photos by Nelta Kasparian.
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