VSSL Studio are excited to announce the London premiere of Keioui Keijaun Thomas's most recent performance - Come Hell Or High Femmes: The Dolls Rise, as part of the VSSL Studio's Entanglements of the Apocalypse programme.
Keioui will performance on Wednesday the 13th of August - 7pm sharp - at the Horse Hospital (WC1N 1JD).
ABOUT COME HELL OR HIGH FEMMES: THE DOLLS RISE:
“Set in the year 2666, following a mass extinction of most human life, Come Hell or High Femmes: The Dolls Rise explores - in Thomas’ words - a 'post-apocalyptic world where black transfemmes have survived and are building a new universe." - Joshua Chambers
In Thomas's new solo project - Come Hell Or High Femmes: The Dolls Rise - a three part film and multimedia performance, Thomas charts a post-apocalyptic geography. Her world is lush and verdant; the artist, bathed in a sky blue dress of tulle, wanders across babbling brooks, oceans, and atop hills of fertile land. Thomas imagines a time where the dolls — a word that, loosely, means a trans femmes so flawless and unbound they are no longer considered real — have survived a mass extinction.
Why are dolls the only ones left? Perhaps, it is because trans femmes (often, but not always) are forged in nocturnality, where beauty and intelligence must learn to supersede time and space. Thomas reclaims what it means to be black in nature, forging new ways to exist in peace, joy, and healing in relation to the American landscape. The work moves through sound, light, poetry, dance, and music as forms of resistance and healing. The choreography is based on queering landscapes, camouflage, and metamorphosis as modes of survival and transcendence for queer and trans people.
ABOUT KEIOUI KEIJAUN THOMAS:
Keioui Keijaun Thomas (b.1989) is a New York-based artist. She creates live performance and multimedia installations that address the multifaceted realms of Black identity formation, encompassing affective, material and economic dimensions. Through a captivating fusion of sculpture and performance, the work explores the transient nature of the “doll”— a trans femme so flawless and unbound she is no longer considered real—as both a work in progress and a formidable force of nature.
Utilising an array of materials such as paper, hair, sugar, rubber, tape, acrylic, water, enamel and skin to create tableaus that are intricately intertwined with her own body. Her performances combine rhapsodic layers of live and recorded voice, slipping between various modes of address, to explore the pleasures and pressures of dependency, care, and support. By centering self and communal care in real-time, Thomas’ practice aims to build bridges of understanding and community.
Thomas has presented work both nationally and internationally. She earned her Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA with Honors from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
See more of her recent work HERE
ABOUT ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE APOCALYPSE:
Entanglements of the Apocalypse is a transdisciplinary programme exploring queer and trans imaginaries of world-building in response to apocalypse(s). Grounded in ongoing research, the programme critically reinterprets the idea of apocalypse through queer and trans lenses, actively resisting capitalist and colonial narratives that frame apocalypse as a singular or final event.
Drawing inspiration from Oxana Timofeeva’s concept of apocalypse as a cyclical and continuous condition, this project engages with apocalypse as an ongoing transformative process that shapes collective memory and artistic practices.
Led by independent curators and artists, the programme challenges conventional narratives around ‘the end,’ creating spaces for dialogue, experimentation, and collective expression. The programme imagines exhibition-making as an inclusive and collaborative learning process, working closely with queer communities to build spaces of resistance, care, and speculative creativity. Through radically intimate and emergent methods, this initiative uses apocalyptic thinking as a means of envisioning alternative and transformative present and future.
The continuing programme will unfold over the following six months with a series of exhibitions, public gatherings, workshops, talks, and experimental learning events at VSSL Studio and across community spaces - FURTHER ARTISTS AND CONTRIBUTORS WILL BE ANNOUNCED SOON - The programme invites audiences to collectively engage with post-apocalyptic thinking, queer world-building, and trans-led imaginaries that centre care, pleasure, hybridity, and embodied knowledge.
www.vssl-studio.org
ABOUT VENUE ACCESS:
Although the venue is step free, the toilets are NOT wheelchair accessible.