ARLES.- Born in Sierra Leone, Julianknxx has developed a practice shaped by movement across geographies, languages, and historical conditions. Raised between The Gambia and London, he approaches diaspora not as a fixed identity but as a lived and unfinished condition, a space of rupture, transmission, invention, and return. Working with film, performance, installation, poetry, and sound, he creates works that resist singular narratives. Instead, he gathers voices, gestures, memories, songs, and fragments of history into forms that make visible what official accounts have often neglected, silenced, or distorted.
In Search of… Incredible, first developed during the artist’s residency at LUMA Arles, brings these concerns into a powerful exhibition where sculpture, film, sound, and found objects form a living architecture of memory. The exhibition unfolds through three interrelated movements—transmitting, transforming, and preserving. It asks how memory survives not as a closed record, but as something embodied and continually remade through relations. At its core is a meditation on ancestry, resilience, and rituals of grief as a practice of tending, carrying, and refusing disappearance. Intangible layers of reality become tangible in the exhibition space, and what cannot be fully said is held instead in rhythm, repetition, texture, and form.
The title itself emerged from an intimate act of care, when words were discovered on a cardboard box used by the artist’s mother to send a sculpture carved from one of his drawings. These drawings emerged from a sustained exchange between the artist and his mother in The Gambia, developed as a means of maintaining connection across distance and of sharing images, ideas, and forms of thought. Produced by the artist and reinterpreted by local carpenters as small rosewood sculptures, the works were then sent back to him in London, establishing a circuit of transmission grounded in intimacy, collaboration, and material transformation. The objects gave shape to a shared inquiry into what these forms might be, what lineages they might carry, and how they might exist in the world—as amulets, totems, sculptures, or protective presences.
For the exhibition, this body of work has been further transformed. Some sculptures have been recast in salt, burnished, stained with natural dyes, or reconfigured through found materials, extending the process of transmission and remaking.
These works suggest that meaning is often held in ordinary materials, and that history is carried through gestures, songs, and acts of care performed across time and distance.
Alongside the sculptures, moving images create a space where testimony and cosmology, mourning and affirmation, remain inseparable with the sound running through the process. In Julianknxx’s work, sound is never secondary or illustrative. It is a generative force, a social, emotional, and spiritual technology through which worlds are held together. Within the exhibition are lullabies developed in relation to the Boras Choir in Marseille, whose songs carry Comorian oral traditions across generations and migratory histories. These are not simply songs of comfort. They are vessels of memory and survival, intimate structures through which narratives and experiences are preserved in the body and passed on through breath, repetition, and vibration. The voice becomes the first archive, a living repository of grief, tenderness, endurance, and cultural continuity.
Salt is the exhibition’s other binding force. Appearing throughout the different artworks, from sculptures to films, salt operates as both material and metaphor. It preserves, heals, wounds, and consecrates. It evokes sweat, tears, seawater, labor, ritual, and extraction. In Julianknxx’s work, salt links the intimate to the historical, connecting the body to displacement, loss, nourishment, and the violent legacies of colonial trade. It is a substance of accumulation, formed layer by layer, holding time even as it transforms what it touches.
In Search of… Incredible is telling the story of how something survives, how memory is carried, reshaped, and offered back to the world, how history lives within voice and ritual, and how art can make space for realities that other systems of representation are not able to see.
Organized by:
Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Artistic Director
Eimear Martin, Curator
Zoé Crouzat, Assistant Curator
