TASI AIR
Afrofuture Artist-in-Residency
TASI AIR is an invite-only residency program that supports the work of afrofuture artists and thinkers. A multi-disciplinary program, TASI is a place not only to conduct research and develop a project but also a home to contemplate and rest. TASI hosts one event where the artist-in-resident shares their research, ideas, and/or questions that were prompted by their stay. To be alerted to upcoming events and announcements about TASI AIR, please sign up for our email list below.
JAMIKA AJALON
Jamika Ajalon is a prolific interdisciplinary artist, author, musician, and filmmaker. She has created several experimental short films and documentaries in locations across the globe, including South Africa, Senegal, London, and New York. Published in numerous anthologies and journals such as Speculative City and Lit Hub, her debut novel, Skye Papers (2021, Feminist Press), has garnered critical acclaim with positive reviews from the New York Times and Kirkus Review. The novel employs mixed genres to address the surveillance effect on counterculture in the 90s and serves as a continuum of her critically acclaimed early experimental film, Memory Tracks, which premiered at the London Soho Theatre and continues to be screened internationally.
Her poetry and lyrics have been featured in over a dozen albums, including the newly released Rebooted (Jamika & the Argonauts 2022). Collaborating with acclaimed artists, she recently served as an interpreter/performer with Ali Cherri on his Venice Biennale award-winning piece Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022) and as a dialogue writer on Shu Lea Cheng's recently released film UKI (2023). As an interdisciplinary artist, she works with mixed mediums, including digital and analog audio-visual elements. Most recently, she completed an experimental sonic poetry EP, Fugitive (2022), based on her book of poetry Take Back The Narrative (published in 2017).
In recent years, her single-screen sonic video Alchemy was featured in the Witches Expo at the Arts Centre of Contemporary Arts Centre, Berlin. Jamika has also been delivering audio-visual performative lectures she calls "Audio Visual Anti Lectures" for over a decade. Her latest, "Skye Papers Panoptic" (UCLA, USA 2023, Museum of Contemporary Art, Biennale, St Etienne France 2022), canters around surveillance culture and its relation to memory and narrative, incorporating visual loops, sonic scapes, spoken word, and sampled text from her novel Skye Papers. She is currently on tour with a Paris-based modular jazz/poetry ensemble, Baldwin In Transit, a fluid collaboration between French musicians and Black American expat poets inspired by the work of James Baldwin. www.jamikaajalon.com