The IMA is excited to present award-winning artist and director Jenn Nkiru’s first solo exhibition in Australia. REBIRTH IS NECESSARY explores the magic and dynamism of Blackness in a realm where time and space are altered. The now, the past, and the future are rethought and reordered to create something soulful and mind-bendingly visceral.
Jenn Nkiru is an award-winning visionary artist and director. Pushed through an afro surrealist lens, her works are grounded in the history of black music, the aesthetics of experimental film, international art cinema, the black arts movement, and the rich and variegated tradition of cinemas of the black diaspora and their distinct experimentation with the politics of form.
Nkiru was selected for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2019 Whitney Biennial and in 2020 she was the co-recipient of the Jarman Award. She was the 2021 Grammy Award Winner for Best Music Video for her direction on Brown Skin Girl by Beyonce and also received a CICLOPE Award, Soul Train Music Award, NAACP Image Award, and Cannes Lion award for the clip. Her latest piece, OUT / SIDE OF TIME, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York opened in 2021 as part of the exhibition: Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room.
Image: Jenn Nkiru, ‘REBIRTH IS NECESSARY’ (video still), 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Mothership
