A Continual Cry

SERAFINE1369 engages deeply with questions of intimacy, technology, alienation and boundaries. As the current Gropius Bau’s In House: Artist in Residence they have been investigating what they term “Oracular Practice”. This is the idea that movement and dance can act as tools for divination, and that such messages can find form through choreography. The COVID-19 pandemic has radically affected the ability of performers and audiences to come together. Thinking about liveness when the body cannot be physically present led SERAFINE1369 to reexamine their own archive. Over the summer they sifted through all the video material that they have created since 2015. In A Continual Cry an algorithm selects and plays at random one minute segments of SERAFINE1369’s trailers, videos from live shows and performance documentation. These machine selections are overlaid by the artist’s voice performing the role of the talking clock, an eerie "continual counting of colonial time, the clock, marking each minute, describing and archiving the moment the present slips into the past.“ Programmed so as not to repeat, A Continual Cry, is a jarring, fragmented work, ever unfolding in the here and now.

SERAFINE1369, previously known as Last Yearz Interesting Negro (2016–2020), is the artist and dancer Jamila Johnson-Small. They work with dancing as a “philosophical undertaking”, as a “political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world”. Recent projects include from darkness into darkness at Tate Britain, London (2021) and I I I (something flat, something cosmic, something endless) at Liverpool Biennial (2021). The first iteration of A Continual Cry was commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary.