Jet Black Futures

‘Jet Black Futures’ is an ongoing multicomponent project spanning a number of solo exhibitions linked by a monograph publication (production delayed due to Covid pandemic). The project title is deliberately ambiguous and is an exploration of notions of ‘black futurity,’ within which ‘blackness’ functions not only as a ‘racial’ but also a cultural, political and technological category. It is within the use of the term ‘jet blackness’ that the project explores both the fear of insurgent dark futurism, as embodied within the term ‘tech-noir’, and the re-scribing of current and future technologies around ‘black’ cultural and political presences. This project has its conceptual and theoretical start point in the work ‘Robot Bodies’ (1998-2017) that explores the black body as analogous to the technological ‘other’ within science fiction. It is also rooted in the project ‘Code/Code II’ (2015-2020) exploring notions of machine linguistics and computer programming languages in relation to notions of ‘patois.’ These ideas fed into a 2017 video work entitled ‘Mic Drop’ examining the microphone as a technological conduit for ‘outsider voices’ within black cultural and political discourse, staged within the exhibition ‘Jet Black Futures I’ at the Beaconsfield Gallery London. This thematic trend was then further extended into two connected solo exhibitions taking place in two regional art galleries in the ‘West Midlands,’ sometimes referred to as the ‘Black Country.’ ‘Body Politics’ (October-December 2019 at Wolverhampton Art Gallery), and ‘Jet Black Futures II’ (planned for the New Art Gallery Walsall from September-December 2020, postponed to September 2021 due to Covid-19) are connected by a planned monograph publication produced jointly by the galleries and funded by a Paul Mellon Centre Publication Grant and Middlesex University. These projects combine to explore questions around ‘futurity’, technology and ‘blackness’ that re-examine Dery’s notion of ‘Afrofuturism’ (1994).

A multicomponent project spanning a number of solo exhibitions.
(1) Jet Black Futures 1 at Beaconsfield Gallery
(2) Jet Black Futures component of Robot Bodies
(3) Jet Black Futures component of Code/Code II
(4) Jet Black Futures component of Keith Piper: Body Politics. Works from 1982-2007. Wolverhampton Art Gallery 2019.