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Rosa-Johan Uddoh (Visual Arts, 2021)AutoCutie_performedwithDIDD_Photo-Paul Chapellier (5)

Rosa-Johan Uddoh

Shortlisted in 2021 for Visual Arts

Rosa-Johan Uddoh is an interdisciplinary practitioner working towards radical self-love, inspired by Black feminist practice and writing. Using performance, installation and writing she explores an infatuation with places, objects or celebrities in British popular culture, and the effects of these on self-formation. Particularly, Uddoh is interested in Black performance in popular culture – how it can expand or constrict the way Black people move through space. Her experiences as a Black woman in Architecture and living in a former colonial centre, London, have generated her acute understanding of the way in which space is materially built and socially structured, and how this affects the way we relate through our bodies, behaviors and sense of self.

Uddoh’s work utilises humor, appropriation and parody as tools used by diasporic subjects for creative resistance. Each of her performances appropriate a particular popular media format, working with people’s preconceived ideas as a gesture towards taking ownership of mass-media. Her first book, Practice Makes Perfect, a collection of scripts and scores explores these themes, will be co-published by Focal Point Gallery and Bookworks in 2021.

Uddoh lectures in BA Performance at Central Saint Martins and has exhibited at the Tate, Jupiter Woods, Black Tower and Bluecoat amongst others.