Max HeyraudIrish photographer Maclaine Black and theatre-maker Ikenna Anyabuike present You Will Rejoice, a multidisciplinary exhibition that fuses photography, performance and sound into a stark meditation on identity, collapse and contemporary life.
The boundaries between photography, performance and publishing continue to dissolve in You Will Rejoice, a new multimedia exhibition from artist duo Maclaine Black and Ikenna Anyabuike (MBXIA). Opening in Berlin this July before travelling to London and Ireland, the project presents an uncompromising meditation on grief, political instability and contemporary identity through an immersive combination of photography, text, sound and live performance.
Black, whose monochrome photography has become closely associated with the international gabber underground, approaches the exhibition through investigations into surveillance, bodily transformation and the erosion of identity. Theatre-maker and writer Ikenna Anyabuike brings ongoing research into Afro-Surrealism, drawing together poetry, performance and ritual to examine memory, displacement and the psychological aftermath of youth. Together, the pair have developed a practice defined by mutual challenge, pushing each other’s disciplines towards increasingly experimental territory.
The exhibition spans four interconnected elements: an artist’s book of photography, poetry and prose; large-scale photographic works installed with organic materials; a continuous sixteen-minute score; and a short film paired with live performance. Together, these components form a single work in which photography, text, sound and performance collapse into one immersive environment, described by the artists as “beauty from the pieces left behind.”
You Will Rejoice opens on 18 July at Studio Acephale in Berlin before travelling to Stueck in London from 14–16 August, with an Irish presentation scheduled for September. Across each iteration, the artists intend the exhibition to evolve through its international context, reflecting the project’s broader concern with movement, cultural exchange and shared experience.
