“I started using dance in my work because I wanted to image the conflict between my blackness and my whiteness. Dancing alone looks and feels like a fight with the self; the body becomes in discussion with itself and the space that it’s in.”

Interview by Charlie Mills

Could you tell us a bit about yourselves and your background? Where did you study?

My name is Rene and I’m 23. I grew up in the funny little city of Peterborough. I moved to London when I was 18 to study fashion design but quickly realised I preferred fine art so, I dropped out after my first year. I moved in with my then fiancé (now wife) in Liverpool where I had a studio at The Royal Standard. I lived and worked there for a year to get a portfolio together and then we moved back to London so I could study Fine Art at Central St Martens. I graduated in June 2020 during lockdown and have been making and showing work ever since.

You cite the American singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone as a major influence in your work — what is it about them and their work you find so galvanising?

My parents were both huge Nina Simone fans and I had a teacher in primary school who would play her on repeat whilst we were working. For so long, all I knew was this genderless, beautiful creamy voice. Then when I was about 15 I started to discover Nina as the activist, the icon and the pianist. Sadly, this was after she passed away and I couldn’t and still can’t wrap my head around this person existing in this world. This world, even now, isn’t ready for a Nina Simone.

A lot of my work focuses on the consequences of living in this society as marginalised people. In my opinion, Nina was a victim and a target in the same way that Martin Luther King was. Lucky enough for us, she left bread crums, and it would be criminal to not to follow them.

Your three works, This All Belongs to You, Brown Girl in the Art World III and we give a lead to Britain, include videos of you dancing in particular locations — outside a South East London garage, outside a pub in Skegness and inside the Lambeth Town Hall in Brixton. What is it about dancing that you find interesting as a medium, formally and as a means of storytelling?

I started using dance in my work because I wanted to image the conflict between my blackness and my whiteness. Dancing alone looks and feels like a fight with the self; the body becomes in discussion with itself and the space that it’s in.

The first time I filmed myself dancing I noticed I would fluctuate between different genres and eras of dance from Northern Soul to Voguing to moshing. These eras of dance have grown from violent and oppressing political climates. Each dance move is a way to communice outside of the language of the oppressor. Dance allows for opacity and when filmed in slow motion it captures the body in all of its clarity and all of its abstraction.

Your recent solo show at VITRINE Gallery, London, was called Born British, Die British. For the exhibition you received the eponymous tattoo across your back from Lal Hardy, a well-known figure from the punk and skinhead scene since 1979. This single gesture unfurls a complex history and set of myths concerning not only the skinhead movement and its shifting relationship to race but of ‘Britishness’ in general. What did you hope to discover or reveal through this process?

For me, this work is not about discovery or revelation. It speaks of the reality of hailing from the Black British diaspora, connoting the historical violence enacted on Black and Brown bodies in the name of ‘Great’ Britain, both historically and today.

The image of a middle-aged white man inscribing Britishness on the body of a 23-year-old, mixed-race, non-binary femme reads like an inauguration or an initiation. By reclaiming this body marking as my own, I signal and celebrate my skin as a subversive surface that undermines what it means to be born British and to die British in modern-day, multi-cultural Britain.  I exist as a glitch and this work mocks those who refuse to embrace the error. It throws shade, it’s sarcastic, it’s ironic, it’s rude… but its right.

You speak frequently about ‘irreducibility’ in your work, whether that is between acts of celebration and violence, recognition and disavowal, or your own lived experience as a queer mixed-race artist. Is it important that your works remain open ended — that a level of discomfort or cognitive dissonance remains in their reception? 

Who am I to attempt to define any kind of truth other than my own in this world? To leave room is so integral to my survival and in turn my practice. The cognitive dissonance is not a choice, it is – again – reality. Why would I attempt to straighten anything out when there isn’t anything straight about me lmao.

I’m not talking about letting things be, because of course I am here as an explorer. But if I was to conclude my explorations then it would be to assume my journey has an end. I am terrible at articulating this through words because the whole thing really is just all poetry and using the abstraction of poetry to convey the abstraction of one’s experiences.  As Audrey Lorde writes in ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’ (1985): “We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives”.

I suppose my answer is that the works remain open because I do. Of course I do - I’m 23.

Discord, conflict and tragedy are subjects never far away in your practice. Yet it is love, joy and happiness that shine through. How has love been an inspiration to you, and do you see it as a recurring expression in your work?

I suppose really, when I talk about ‘leaving room’ that is where the love lives. When I first started as a practicing artist I thought I was ok that the work would make me ill. Until I realised that the work could be the respite. I was so angry at my parents for bringing brown babies into this world until I realised that I was a product of love and a love that as Kathleen Collins writes about in ‘whatever happened to interracial love?’ was “the love of two human beings who mate in spite of or because of or instead of or after the fact of.” It opened up my world to trying to understand evil but without giving it power. Looking for the child in evil. Tony Morri­son says that “evil is compelling, goodness lurks backstage… Evil has vivid speech, goodness bites it’s tongue.” We have to pay attention to what we are foregrounding and perpetuation. Goodness is the goal.

In May this year, you will have a new permanent commission unveiled at Bold Tendencies in Peckham, London. It is called no more quick, quick, slow. Can you tell us about the new work and what are the ideas that inspired it?

no more quick, quick, slow is inspired by a quote in Lucy Bland’s book ‘Britain’s ‘Brown Babies’ (2019) that reads, “We English girls took to it like ducks to water. No more quick, quick, slow for us. This was living.” The quote references meeting, loving and dancing with black men (specifically black G.I.s). The work is about this messy dance of de-colonisation and how dancing alone cannot always protect me. Really, it is a call to action –to do/dance better and to remember who we should dancing with and who we should let lead.

The flag was on display last year but  BT asked to have it as a permanent part of their display so we decided to give her a little bit of a make-over for her new home.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I am currently working on a book of photographs with Arcadia Missa Gallery called ‘flags for countries that don’t exist but for bodies that do.’ The launch of the book will also involve a show which I am really excited about. I have a few lovely group shows in the works which I am in the studio preparing for. And of course, the reveal of the new flag with Bold Tendencies.

Artist’s website

All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 20/05/21