JaLeel Marques Porcha

    I make performance, photography, video, and installations as an extended practice of black study. My work is grounded in the (wayward, fugitive) everyday performance of black vernacular life. In my performance practice, I use theater, interpretive movement, and recitations of original and pre-existing texts to “describe the life that oscillates among the categories of domestic, whore, slave, and corpse” (Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments). I rely on failure and experimentation, looking backwards as a means of renegotiating looking backwards as a means of renegotiating what I think I know. By foregrounding process, action, and everyday experience, I challenge the idea that knowledge is held only within documents and essays, using the language of the academic elite. My interest lies in how performance, when used as a process-based tool, can help evolve experiences that reconnect people to severed lines of thinking not found in an institution, but at landmarks of public communal exchange and internalization.

     JaLeel received their BFA in Photography & Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Visual Arts from Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of Art.