Julianknxx: In Search of… Incredible at LUMA Arles, review

This is a thought-provoking and well-curated exhibition; one that is simultaneously personal and political. More than that, though, it is emotionally vulnerable and deeply moving. On entering the dimly lit exhibition space, multiple senses are invoked at once. Wooden sculptures sit atop tree trunks, dramatically spotlit, while the hauntingly beautiful choral songs of the Marseille-based Boras Choir emerge from a multi-channel video installation. These songs are in fact lullabies drawn from Comorian oral traditions, preserving, embodying and transmitting memories and stories. 

In Search of Incredible, Julianknxx, 2026 - 2027, La Tour, Underground, LUMA Arles, France. Image credit Grégoire d'Ablon.

Julianknxx first began collaborating with the Boras Choir in 2023 while developing his exhibition Chorus in Rememory of Flight at the Barbican in London. While in residence at LUMA last year, the collaboration deepened and led to the new film installation What Colours Can We Dream in This Night Filled with Salt. Salt is an important creative cornerstone for the artist and Arles itself has a long history of salt production. Parts of the film were shot in the nearby salt marshes at Salin-de-Giraud, the largest in Europe. In these scenes, lone figures stand on ridges in the sparse landscape, their flowing white clothes buffeted by the wind. The predominantly grey colour palette of the sky and salt creates an oppressive intensity and the restriction of visual stimuli further heightens the emotional tenor of the singers’ voices. A poem written by the artist adds another layer to the soundscape and reminds us of the importance of oral traditions in the transmission of Black histories. 

Julianknxx, Still from What Colours Can We Dream In This Night Filled With Salt_, 2025 © Studioknxx_03.

In a second video installation, Two Moons, dancers Karel Kouelany and Joël Assebako move effortlessly through a dark space, their bodies elegantly contorting. Against the pitch-black background, their bodies sparkle, bathed in electric blue light. The glimmering texture of their skin is created through salt, which they rub on one another as if performing a ceremonial act. And in a way, they are. Julianknxx describes how this work has become a site of both memory and grief for his two brothers who passed away. Even without knowing this context, there is an undeniably elegiac feel to the dancers’ movements. Exhibited in the same room are two celestial sculptures which trace stellar formations created by the dancers’ movements, set against the night sky as it was in Freetown, Sierra Leone, when the artist's brothers were born. Experienced together, the film and sculptures mourn and celebrate life, emphasising its fundamental unknowability and hinting at possibilities beyond the material realm.

In Search of Incredible, Julianknxx, 2026 - 2027, La Tour, Underground, LUMA Arles, France. Image credit Grégoire d'Ablon.

Alongside these installations are personal correspondence, family photographs and small rosewood sculptures through which Julianknxx interweaves his own archives with traditional ethnographic modes of display. The sculptures are born of an ongoing exchange with his mother in Gambia, who takes the drawings he sends her to a local carpenter to reimagine in 3D form. This unexpected form of communication and co-creation is, in the artist’s own words, a way of “preserving a dialogue with home, across the oceans. The thing that keeps coming up is searching for the ineffable, the thing that you can’t put language on.” 

In Search of Incredible, Julianknxx, 2026 - 2027, La Tour, Underground, LUMA Arles, France. Image credit Grégoire d'Ablon.

Julianknxx’s work is multidisciplinary to its core, showing us a new way to see, hear and feel that is rooted in history but resonates powerfully in the present. Salt is a fitting metaphor for his practice, which effortlessly connects the past with the present and the personal with the collective, tapping into deep, spiritual registers. In his work, art does not reflect life and life does not reflect art: they are one and the same.

Julianknxx: In Search of… Incredible is on view at LUMA Arles, Arles, France until 10 January 2027. Book tickets at luma.org

By Sofia Carreira Wham