Kitso Lynn Lelliott

Bio

Kitso Lynn Lelliott is an artist, scholar and filmmaker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research and studio practice excavates and/or interrupts historical instances of elision, usually having to do with renegotiating and enunciating omitted knowledges, histories or narratives. Oscillating between what is ‘real’ and revealing erasure, the artist often embodies or motions at instances of retrieval, at times lending her own body in the retelling or re-articulation of said instances.

She states, "I am preoccupied with enunciations from spaces beyond epistemic power and the crisis such epistemically disobedient articulations cause to hegemony. I engage the production of the ‘real’ as it is shaped through contesting epistemologies, their narratives and the shape these narratives took over the waters of the Atlantic during the formative episode that shaped the modern age. My work is an enactment of enunciating from elision and between historically subjugated subjectivities while privileging South-South relations imaginatively and epistemologically unmediated by the Global North. My body of work lives through multiple iterations building a network of relations through a series of installations across times and spaces implicated in the production of hierarchies of being and knowing. If we exist in a space that sees the systematic erasure of certain kinds of bodies and peoples and histories, their voices and the value for certain kinds of lives I tend to seek out and interfere with places and narratives that were/are involved in producing this erasure. As I am interested in the narratives wherein the elided humanity of subjugated peoples lie, I rely on ‘othered’ modes or recollection, on memories and ancestralities alongside histories and archive - to re-member them.