#54: Shifting | Spirit | Time
An ambitious new multi-screen film installation by acclaimed poet, artist, and filmmaker Julianknxx. Known for his extensive research and commitment to (re)visiting places and people for collaboration, this latest work builds on the artist’s performance 'Chorus is Flight' presented in May 2024 on the steps of the Stedelijk Museum with the Memoria Collective, conducted by Elique Curiel, in collaboration with Metro54.
“We once sang a song of old words
Mapping time into the archive of the body.”
– Julianknxx
What does it mean to return—again and again—to a sound, a word, a gesture? To linger with repetition as both ritual and resistance? In Shifting | Spirit | Time, Julianknxx transforms the echo into matter itself. This new commission, unfolding as a multi-screen film installation at Buro Stedelijk, emerges from the artist’s May 2024 performance with the Memoria Collective on the steps of the Stedelijk Museum. Here, repetition becomes material, a rhythmic pulse that opens up the body to deeper ways of knowing.
The refrain ‘Wai Wai Wai’ is both echo and insistence—a poetic meditation, a sonic ceremony, a call that binds memory to breath. As the voices of the choir rise and return, they carry traces of ancestral histories, of miles traversed, of stories carried forward. This work asks us not simply to hear but to listen—to attune ourselves to the ways sound can hold memory across time and distance.
For Julianknxx, the poem never ends on the page; it shifts into stance, into song, into way-making. His interdisciplinary practice—rooted in poetry but expanding into performance, film, music, and sculpture—grapples with themes of connection, loss, inheritance, and belonging. As Foluke Taylor asks, ‘How long do you need for your making way?’ And so, the artist invites us to sit with the rhythm, to dwell in the echo, to witness how sound reshapes space.
“Washing was never for the skin but a ritual to prepare us for the day.”
– Julianknxx
This installation offers space to reflect on the legacies we carry—those held in bodies, in breath, in song. It is a meditation on diasporic movement and the ways cultural memory survives: through repetition, through attunement, through sculpture, through collective voice. The choir becomes more than sound; it becomes metaphor—a gathering, material, a community in resonance.
Culminating in a space for reflection, Shifting | Spirit | Time underscores the importance of listening—to one another, to history, to the echoes that refuse to be silenced. The work resists the linear, the singular, and instead embraces the polyphonic, the layered.
In ode to the birthplace of Chorus in Rememory of Flight, first shown at the Barbican Curve in London (2023) and later at Metro54 in Amsterdam (2024), Julianknxx presents a new chapter in his poetic exploration with And If a Tree Sees It All – a video installation blending poetry and cinematic meditation. At its core stands De boom die alles zag (The Tree Which Saw Everything), a steadfast witness to the Bijlmermeer disaster. For thirty years, this tree has silently borne witness to collective grief and resilience, its presence entwined with the histories of a mourning community. This presentation includes a newly edited version with footage shot in Amsterdam in May 2024.
“How do you move a poem from the page into the visual space? Give it texture, sound, that emotion.”
– Julianknxx
Julianknxx’s practice challenges us to rethink how we tell stories—how memory lingers not just in words but in gestures, rhythms, and collective acts of witnessing. Drawing on oral traditions and grounded in his Sierra Leonean heritage, his work remaps the boundaries of European and African narratives, resisting the constraints of national borders while holding space for those shaped by them.
Shifting | Spirit | Time is not just an exhibition. It is an invocation. A gathering. A listening. A way forward.
Buro Stedelijk Central Space
27 February 2025 – 24 April 2025
Opening
27 Feb, 18:30 – 20:30
Open daily with Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam ticket / Dagelijks geopend met Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam ticket (Museumplein 10), 10:00 – 18:00