Khaleb Brooks: Can I Get A Witness

About

Brooks is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and writer exploring blackness, transness and collective memory. Rooted in personal experience, Can I Get A Witness offers a new range of mixed media, oil paintings, installations and sound-based works that chart the various angles and journeys of the artist’s life.

An intimate display of medical scans that memorialise the artist’s body before undergoing gender-affirming surgery is placed alongside mixed media imagery grappling with the historical policing of black women, here too exploring empowerment as a tool of survival. Informed by and reflective of Brooks’ characteristically multifaceted approach, the exhibition weaves themes such as femininity, girlhood, queerness, family, and the black church through these elements. Underpinned by the artist’s experience as an International Development practitioner, Can I Get A Witness enriches his innovative portfolio, driven by a passion for addressing matters of social justice within the creative sector.

He explains: “Black women, while making up the majority of congregations in Christian churches across the U.S., rarely serve as spiritual leaders. The women in the ministry are also entrepreneurs, founders, heads of households, breadwinners; and in the case of my mother: the pastor’s bodyguard”.​