His work seeks to push boundaries between visual media and socially-engaged practices, employing still and moving images, multimedia installations, placemaking, and sound-based performances as sites of contestation and testimony.
While J. Paris’s ongoing Investigation explores the entanglements between stigmatised social experiences and contemporary built-environments. He is particularly interested in immersing modes of historiography: archiving through regenerative and hospitable notes.
Registo II
Billboard | Installation
2022, Cypher billboard, Bounds Green, documentation by Sofia Yale N’Lolo
2022, Cypher billboard, Bounds Green, documentation by Sofia Yale N’Lolo
In a present that is rooted in histories of enslavement and colonialism, where Black subjects have been repeatedly denied; Black diasporic autobiographical practices do not simply function as acts of self-representation, but also as physical gestures of embodiment that push solidly back against this denial - spatial representations of absent subjects. In the context of this display, Henrique poses autobiographical portraiture as a method for thinking about Black male visual archives and phenomenal space(s) - a series of experiences and events that shape individual and collective existential perception.
The work deals with ideas around characterisation and aesthetic engineering, which in turn confront histories of spectatorship, spectacularity and gaze - dynamics of visual domination corresponding to mass culture and colonial service. ‘Registo II’ does not seek the viewer’s full comprehension, but instead stages hapticity*; signalling demands for critical spectatorship.
Text by Holly Graham
*A term derived from the root word “haptic” (of or relating to touch), used by Tina Campt in her book A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (2021). Campt defines the term as follows: "hapticity: the labor of feeling across a shared spatiality; communicating and collaborating across differential relationships to space and time; bodies required to feel out, feeling with, across, and through one another to create a sense of intimacy.”