James Jordan Johnson is born and living in London and has recently graduated from the Royal College of Art. He is interested in the generative space of concealment and divergence through representation, culture making and the relativity of truth and imagination. He centres his thinking through how genealogies of Caribbean material culture facilitates forms of illegible knowledge systems and uses pre-existing or self-established methods of opacity and slowness.
Forthcoming
2025 - 2026 New Contemporaries Studio Residency, FormaHQ, UK
2025 Momo Ma Pak Yin & James Jordan Johnson, Performance, What is The Responsibility of Performance Artists to Genocide?, House of Anetta, UK
Current
“Caribbean-Yet-To-Come” is a curatorial research platform that explores the multiple relationships between performance, territory, and materiality in contemporary Caribbean art since 2017. It is also the title of the new exhibition at the MAC, which brings together photographs and videos of performances accompanied by drawings, sculptures, objects, texts, and songs that construct an Antillean archive/territory.
These works trace a diversity of body practices carried out by nineteen Caribbean artists and those from their diasporas in the Americas and Europe. Executed across coastal territories located in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Captiva Island (U.S.), Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Newfoundland and Labrador (Canada), Chile, and the United Kingdom, the works and shores constitute a transnational archipelago.
The exhibition focuses on how Caribbean island artists establish a multitude of connections with the repertoires of oceanic, telluric, atmospheric, and cosmological agencies that constitute, animate, and immeasurably transit the Antillean territories. The works do not invite contemplation of a mere tropical landscape waiting to be occupied, intervened, and exploited as an inert resource.
Instead, “Caribe to Come” explores a notion of territory that proposes approaching the Caribbean islands as an entity filled with agency, desire, contemplation, thought, and generative will—an entity that is both interlocutor and collaborator of human agencies.
Artists: James Jordan Johnson, Carlos Martiel, Luis Vazquez La Roche, Johan Mijai, Nadia Huggins, Pó Rodil, Eduardo Alegría, Javier Orfon, Las Nietas de Nonó, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Yiyo Tirado, Merián Soto, Beatriz Santiago Muńoz, Claudia Claremi, Teresa Hernández, Marta Aponte Alsina, Javier Cardona Otero.
Contact
jamesjordanjohnsoninfo@gmail.com / CV upon request
