Poetics of becoming, SANKOFA

If the inaugural SANKOFA exhibition invited a return, a reaching back to retrieve what was forgotten, displaced, or disowned, then Poetics of Becoming extends that gesture toward a process of continuous renewal.

Here, becoming is neither linear progression nor fixed arrival, but a recursive and relational methodology: a movement shaped by citation, refusal, and the reassembly of diasporic knowledge across form, discipline, and generation.

Presenting the work of twenty-seven Black and Afro-diasporic artists within the RCA BLK community, the exhibition unfolds as a spatial and temporal constellation, centering the nonlinear, the plural, and the opaque. It resists containment, privileging not resolution but resonance. Visitors are invited to move through traces and reverberations that open onto multiple temporalities, where sound, image, and material map the shifting contours of transformation. What is fetched through return is neither static nor past; it is active, unfixed, and continually reconfigured.

“One must consent not to be a single being.” Édouard Glissant

Guided by the thought of Édouard Glissant, the exhibition approaches artistic practice as a form of reorientation, one that embraces opacity over transparency, accumulation over clarity, and multiplicity over linear narrative. Here, opacity is not a barrier to understanding but a mode of relation: an insistence on the complexity and irreducibility of experience, where meaning thickens rather than resolves. Through this lens, the works gathered here do not seek unity but resonate across difference, time, and practice, enacting Glissant’s poetics through layered materials, methods, and the continual interplay of opacity and emergence.

Curated by Julita Mahrer Viñas, in collaboration with and supported by RCA BLK, the exhibition is rooted in an ethos of listening, gathering, and speculative renewal. It holds space for inheritance not as retrospection, but as active, ongoing practice.

Staged in the RCA Hangar Space, Poetics of Becoming continues a curatorial trajectory initiated by SANKOFA (2024) and RCA Black (2011), landmark milestones that redefined how Black presence and artistic excellence are encountered within the Royal College of Art. This iteration does not repeat; it expands, deepening the commitment to relation, inheritance, and the evolving poetics of Black becoming in London and worldwide.

Poetics of Becoming is thus less an exhibition than an unfolding: an invitation to dwell within relation, to listen across distance, and to imagine what might yet come into form.

Private View: 27 November, 6pm

Invited artists

Ramone K Anderson; Shanti Bell; Grace Blenkinsop; Canaan J Brown; Andrew Pierre Hart; Tyreis Holder; Favour Jonathan; James Jordan Johnson; Jordan Zayas Kelly; Xavier Laurent Leopold; Shayla Marshall; Misha Maseka; Emily Alice Mitchell; Emily Moore; Suni Mullen; A'isha Odera Usman Mu'azu; Chris Ofili; Chiedu Okonta; Adjani Okpu-Egbe; Tomilola Olumide; Charlie Philips; Bianca Saunders; Aisha Seriki; Ransom Sutton; Bryant Mclaughlin Van-Low; Joshua Woolford; Joseph Yorke-Wescott.