anti-lecture
Move into surreal
An Anti-Lecture displaces the position of the "lecturer" as the "owner" of knowledge and works to liberate the strictures of erudition. It privileges a knowledge that could be called intuitive rather than 'rational.' Through a multi-layered narrative, I use different mediums, including soundscape, visual loops, and both academic and poetic text, to tell stories that, in many ways, mirror griot tradition. It is not only a way of imparting stories that often get lost within hegemonic discourses but also imparts "ideas" open to more fluid interpretations. The engagement of different perspectives, a progressive, dialectical approach to discourses brings us closer to a notion of Knowledge as free and flowing.
skye papers
A NOVEL JAMIKA AJALON
SKYE PAPERS
This poetically dynamic novel follows Skye, a Black female Jack Kerouac-ian hero, who leaves her Midwestern home for the first time to find people who truly see; her in ways she has never felt before. Her journey leads to adventures across the Atlantic, and from the beginning, we know she is being surveilled, but we don’t know who is doing the watching and why.
“Skye Papers may be Ajalon’s first novel, but she is an experienced artist: a sonic slam poet, musician, multimedia performer and filmmaker with a deep back catalog, evident on every page. From the rhythmic, riffing, incantatory prose to the novel’s cinematic crosscutting and recursive structure, to the minutiae of Skye and her friends’ daily struggles as artists, we get lost in a world that Ajalon renders with precision and lyricism that elude her main character.” —The New York Times
MUSIC/sonic
REBOOTED
The latest album by jamika and the argonauts is the final chapter of the
conceptual series “Don’t Feed the Gate-Keepers.
Available wherever good music can be found.
Baldwin En Transit
Recording of the collaborations between jazz musicians (lead composer, Stephan
Payan) and ‘x-pat’ poets (jamika ajalon, mike lad, tamara walcott) -pays homage to
the work of James Baldwin -- centering themes; “home, transit, and of course love”.
“I would just stare at the sky. For a long time, it seemed nothing happened, except in the worlds created on pages. Outside of that, I was lost” Skye
“I would just stare at the sky. For a long time, it seemed nothing happened, except in the worlds created on pages. Outside of that, I was lost” Skye
meet the Artist
An interdisciplinary artist, author, and lecturer, JAMIKA AJALON has had the fortune of collaborating with brilliant artists worldwide. A creative polymath, she is primarily a writer (poet, novelist, essayist) who employs a mélange of interdisciplinary practices as an extension of her pen (filmmaker, producer, songwriter, electronic digital artist, archivist, performer). Recently, she published the New York Times-reviewed novel “SKYE PAPERS” and completed her album “REBOOTED” (spring 2022). She tours with BALDWIN IN TRANSIT, a jazz poetry ensemble tribute to James Baldwin (Album 2023, Book soon TBA), and has collaborated with renowned artists like Shu Lea Cheng and Ali Cheri, serving as a dialogue consultant for the film “IKU” (2023) and vocalist/interpretation for the art installation “OF MUD AND MEN” (2022 Biennale).
A 2D version of her Anti-Lecture “Skye Papers Panoptic” was published in the book “GLOBALISTO” launched at the 2024 Biennale, with a recent live performance in Brussels as part of the Scores of Narratives festival (spring 2024). She has authored two books of poetry and has been published in several literary magazines and anthologies, including HUB LIT and WE TRAVEL SPACEWAYS. With close to a dozen albums, numerous published writings, exhibitions, and live performances, her intellectual, intuitive, and irreverent work explores themes of memory surveillance, narrative, and the revolutionary power of imagination—from speculative to cosmo-psychedelic. She fuses past and possible futures with a pulse on the present.
Jamika holds a BA in Film from Columbia College Chicago and an MA in Communications in Culture and Society from Goldsmiths University London, with over 20 years of professional experience as a full-time artist.
**ENQUIRIES FOR BOOKING: READINGS/PERFORMANCE/TALKS/BAND -
jamikaajalon(at)gmail.com**
