Jahniah Kum
Booth 018I am an interdisciplinary Caribbean-American artist whose work tends to the evolving shape of grief through self-portraiture, material experimentation, storytelling, and family archive. Shaped by the loss of my mother in 2019, and informed by bell hooks’s framework of “re-membering,” my practice navigates the question: What does it mean to be whole when
something vital is missing? Functioning both as a compass and mirror–creating tension in my work that dissects themes of: Identity, belonging, loss, memory, and girlhood.
Through self-portraiture and materiality, I survey this question, projecting my fears onto a recurring figure who inhabits psychological landscapes I cannot personally bear. Engaging with the framework of the body as archive, this figure first emerged as a site of reclamation but has since evolved into a threshold where binaries: figurative and abstract, presence and
absence, memory and transformation, folklore and reality can coexist.
In 2025 my paintings: “Martyr, 2024” and “Martyr’s Return (Duppy), 2025” develop this psychological space where the figure transforms from a sulking martyr into a wandering soul. In Jamaican folklore, a duppy is a soul not at rest. When creating these paintings, I asked what it means to never be absolved of your grief, which led me to paint my childhood memory with this chimeral spirit.
This work engages with dialogue and research around mythologies of Afro-futurism, specifically through the lens of grief work, illuminating technologies of survival. Experimenting with burlap, mulberry paper, denim, converted family tapes, photography, and
printmaking, I build a register of emotional, ancestral and material depth. Connecting personal and diasporic histories using material specificity to maintain ways of making and storytelling in my practice.
I am committed to developing methodologies of survival within this artistic framework. I am not interested in offering solace or a solution in grieving, but another perspective on where we go when grief is not addressed, who we can be, and what it can transform into.