Ajamu X - Bodybuilder with Bra (1990) Ajamu X
Ajamu X is a fine art photographic artist, archive curator and radical sex activist. He studied at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in the Netherlands and is currently a PhD researcher at Royal College of Art, London.
His objective, through risk taking and experimentation, with a willingness to step outside a ‘creative comfort zone’, is to interrogate, extend and transgress contemporary theoretical debates in photography, specifically in reference to portraiture, the materiality and physicality of the print and notions of identity, representations, sexualities and pleasure; all this through filters: the intersection of Blackness through a queer lens and queerness through a Black lens.
Ajamu was co-founder of the award-winning rukus! Black LGBTQ Archive. Founded in 2000, the rukus! Black LGBT archive mission is to create Europe’s first dedicated living archive, devoted to our heritage, culture and experiences. It aims to collect, preserve, exhibit, and otherwise make available to the public historical, cultural, and artistic materials related to the Black lesbian, gay bisexual and trans communities in the United Kingdom. The materials have been collected from individuals, activists, DJs, club promoters, writers, artists, community organizations and magazine publishers from within and outside local communities.
At Framer Framed in Amsterdam his work has been on show during Diasporic Self: Black Togetherness as Lingua Franca (2019), a project that brings together artists, thinkers, poets and strangers to look into unconstituted archives and informal memories practices that inform, characterize and map contemporary black cultures in Europe. The project addresses the historical and contemporary relationships, codes and lingua franca that are transmitted between various diasporic (artistic) communities, and how these themes shape the practices, conversations and realities of producers and practitioners.
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