Amina Jama & Kinnari Saraiya at Frieze London: Frieze x Deutsche Bank Emerging Curators Fellowship
Experience special projects by fellowship alumni at the 2022 fair, including a cinematic installation and poetry performance
Experience special projects by fellowship alumni at the 2022 fair, including a cinematic installation and poetry performance
To mark the fourth anniversary of the Frieze x Deutsche Bank Emerging Curators Fellowship, fellowship alumni Amina Jama and Kinnari Saraiya will present special projects at Frieze London.
Jama (Curatorial Fellow at Chisenhale Gallery) will collaborate with this year’s Frieze Artist Award Winner, Abbas Zahedi, who as part of the activations accompanying his commission, will broadcast a poetry reading by Jama online and into the fair via a DIY radio.
Saraiya (Curatorial Fellow at BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art) will present Prequel / Sequel, a project utilizing a bespoke digital Bioscope to screen a selection of films at Frieze London. A form of traveling cinema, the traditional Bioscope functioned through a reel of images that were cranked by hand to create the illusion of a moving film. Popularized in the 1890s, the Bioscope found favor in the global south and is still used in India.
The project, as Kinnari describes ‘is an attempt to hold on to the ingrained presence of these traveling cinemas, the experience of watching films in the interstices of everyday life with an organic unity of communal experiences. It is an attempt to protect its simple values as passed down to me in oral accounts by a generation that witnessed its decline’.
About the Frieze x Deutsche Bank Emerging Curators Fellowship
Deutsche Bank and Frieze have announced the return of the Emerging Curators Fellowship, a national initiative supporting emerging Black and POC curators. This year realized in partnership with the Whitworth, the initiative brings together artists and organizations across the non-profit and private sector to increase accessibility, representation and social mobility within the arts as well as creating an opportunity to grow and deepen curatorial practice in some of the UK’s leading public art institutions.
Alongside Deutsche Bank funding, the fellowship programme will be supported by proceeds from the sale of a unique work and an artist-led edition by renowned Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama.
About the Fellows
Amina Jama is a Somali writer, facilitator and curator. Her work focuses on decoloniality, fragmentation, archives, and alternate ways of imagining. Her debut poetry pamphlet A Warning to the House that Holds Me, published by Flipped Eye Press, was the recipient of a 2020 Eric Gregory Award. Amina has worked with the Barbican Centre, Serpentine Gallery, Bernie Grant Arts Centre, ICA, Roundhouse, Royal African Society and Black Cultural Archives.
Kinnari Saraiya (born in Mumbai, 1998) is a Wordbuilder, Artist, Curator and Writer, but primarily, she’s a Storyteller. She works across film, interactive 3D digital immersive environments, installation, animation, sculpture, folk dance and sound which allows her to interweave complex sensorial narratives together. Her work blends memories of her ancestral self into nested colonial realities to build a third space, beyond binaries, that is virtual, transnational and diasporic. She thrives in the gaps of knowledge, the inaccuracies of interpretations, the mistranslations of language, where myth weaves around historical accounts forcing the collision of pre-humanist thought and post-humanist desire. She has won several awards since graduating in 2020 and has exhibited in over 20 exhibitions nationally and internationally, most notably at the Kyiv Biennial 2021 Allied, curated by members of the East Europe Biennial Alliance.
Main image: Kinnari Saraiya, Bioscope, Time Travel Across Many-Worlds, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Photo: Colin Davison © 2022 Baltic
