Break ∀way State
Painting Installation & Performance Archive
Break ∀way State reimagines the video Breakaway State (2020) through a series of paintings based on stills taken from the video footage. The video was commissioned for an online programme of the same name by The Parallel State, and funded by Future's Venture.
The installation traces the impact of migration, colonial legacy, and cultural memory through the embodied language of movement. By drawing on the mathematical universal quantifier '∀' (‘for all’), the work reframes this logical symbol to point towards emotional alignment in the face of state violence by indicating a shared departure from inherited conditions.
These works critique and reveal themes of migration, drawing on the aesthetics and cultural layering of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and themes of cultural migration explored in Zora Neale Hurston's writings. Break ∀way State, as an evolving work, functions as archival fragments, connecting motion to memory.
2023, Oil on Canvas, 40 x 50 cm with Floating Frame: 53.5 x 43 x 4.5 cm
2024, Oil on Wood, 16 x 15 cm
2024, Oil on Wood, 17 x 15.5 cm – Sold
The installation subverts the mission of Empire and their ‘othering’ of subjects. I think about these moments as scores documenting self-determination and taking control over our own bodies, opposing respectable expectations. The mask has been taken off in this configuration taking on a life of its own. The performer in the image, however, is still wearing the very same mask, giving voice to multiple existence and agency located in inanimate objects, allowing these modes of expression to be temporal markers.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.
2024, Oil on Canvas, 25.5 x 20 cm – Sold
Enquiry
I shall try to lay my dreaming aside.
Try hard. But, Oh, if you knew my dreams!
My vaulting ambition! How I constantly live in fancy
In seven league boots, taking mighty strides across the world,
But conscious all the time of being
A mouse on a treadmill.
Madness ensues.
I am beside myself with chagrin half of the time;
The way to the blue hills is not on tortoise back,
It seems to me,
But on wings.
I haven’t the wings,
And must ride the tortoise.