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What Colours Can We Dream…
Julianknxx

  • Music
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  • Performance
  • Free, upon booking

LUMA Arles presents What Colours Can We Dream…, a special performance by Julianknxx extending the ideas and resonances of his exhibition In Search of… Incredible, currently on view at LUMA Arles.

Bringing together Julianknxx, the Marseille-based Boras Choir, and musician Elique Curiel, the performance activates LUMA Arles as a space of collective listening, where voices converge, temporalities overlap, and belonging is explored through sound. Turning toward the city of Arles and its sonic landscape, it asks how we might listen to the city we inhabit and how the city might, in turn, resonate within it. Drawing on sounds, frequencies, and echoes gathered across Arles, the performance approaches music as a form of attunement: a way of sensing one another, inhabiting place, and tracing the connections between memory, presence, and shared experience.

Practical Information

From September 19, 2026 to September 19, 2026
Le Magasin Électrique
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Crédits
Julianknxx, Chorus in Flight, 2024. BURO Stedelijk, Amsterdam. Courtesy Metro54. Photo: DRE
Julianknxx, Chorus in Flight, 2024. BURO Stedelijk, Amsterdam. Courtesy Metro54. Photo: DRE

Event-related exhibition:

Interview with Julianknxx

In this conversation, poet and visual artist Julianknxx reflects on the personal history that shapes his practice. From his childhood between Sierra Leone and The Gambia to his move to the United Kingdom, he recounts the memories, encounters, and journeys that have informed the way he writes and creates.

Throughout his work, objects, gestures, and materials become vessels for these stories. Exchanges with his mother, the drawings and sculptures they send each other, and the salt that appears in several of his works all reveal a deep interest in what is passed from one generation to the next, and in the invisible ties that connect people, places, and histories.

Here, Julianknxx reflects on how storytelling can bring personal memory and collective history into conversation.

Portrait of Julianknxx, 2026, LUMA Arles, France. © Victor&Simon – Iris Millot - Medium

Julianknxx

En savoir plus

Julianknxx was in residence at LUMA Arles from mid April to June 2025.

Julianknxx is a poet, artist, and filmmaker.

Julianknxx is a poet, artist and filmmaker. The polyphonic nature of Julianknxx’s work is indicative of his expansive practice, which is rooted in poetry but extends into performance, film, music and sculpture. Born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Julianknxx draws on his personal experiences to broaden perspectives on the history and culture of Africa and its diasporas. Inspired by oral history traditions and working with a distinctive aesthetic approach, his films invite us to consider how we construct both local and global narratives, while reflecting on how it feels to exist in liminal spaces.

His work has been shown at galleries and museums worldwide, with his latest institutional showcase In Search of…Incredible on view at LUMA Arles until January 2027. Added solo presentations include Shifting / Spirit / Time, BURO Stedelijk, Amsterdam (2025), and St Mary le Strand, London (2025); Chorus In Rememory of Flight, Barbican Curve, London (2023), De Singel, Antwerp (2024), Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian (CAM), Lisbon (2025), and The Model, Sligo (2025).

Additional group shows include: The Bienal de São Paulo (2025), A World in Common, Tate Modern, London (2023), Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam (2024), C/O Berlin (2025), the Sharjah Biennial 16, Sharjah (2025); Resonance: Black Visual Art & Sonic Chronicles, M.Bassy, Hamburg (2025); Keeping Time, Gallery 1957, Accra (2024); Rites of Passage, Gagosian, London (2023); and To Be Held, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate (2023). Previous participations include Whitechapel Gallery Open, London (2022); Nocturnal Creatures, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021); Lux, 180 The Strand, London (2021); The View from There, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021); and more.

Performances include Listening Quantum, St Mary le Strand (2025); Attuned in the Bantutronic with John Akomfrah, TBA21, Madrid (2025); Attuned in the Bantutronic with Tina Campt, 180 Studios, London (2024); Chorus in Flight, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2024), BURO Stedelijk, Amsterdam (2024), and St James’s Church, London (2023); Art Basel Conversations: Sonic Performance, Basel (2023); and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2023).