Jojo Knowles

Grooming I performs the act of eating a raw onion, a practice inspired by the chimpanzees at the Artis Zoo. Chimpanzees in captivity love eating onions, and through pondering ways to become more primal, more animal, and more in touch with nature, I have been training myself to eat raw onions like the captured apes. Clad in a fur bikini I meet the modern ape halfway, from my place within the modern human condition. Brokedly mending and mashing histories of hierarchies and human superiority I am continuously searching for ways for us all to regain autonomy over our animalistic roots.

A sculpture of a dog cage, covered in wax, with an open door and a bowl of food inside. Presented for the solo exhibition Collateral, with works showcasing the small ways animals suffer as collateral damage to daily human lives. Paying homage to the animals that live and die in our cities.

A video on loop of the artist laying, breathing, next to a dead fish.

I went to the grocery store in the morning and bought this dead fish. I hadn’t bought an animal product in ten years, so my heart was racing. I told the woman at the fish stall I needed it in its entirety. She was confused and tried to persuade me not to. She began to cut off the fins anyway and I had to tell her no, no, please keep them. She handed me the fish wrapped up in its plastic bag with an uneasy look on her face. She tried to ask me what I was going to do with it but I couldn’t explain in Portuguese that I was going to make it my baby. The video follows me treating a dead fish as my baby. After spending the day with the fish corpse, I take it for a walk in a stroller around Lisbon. I ask; if a fish is dressed as a human baby, do we feel empathy for it? The crib, made out of a crate used at a fish market, is filled with wet ice cubes. The body inside it is missing but the crib serves as a cradle, or a coffin, for those fish that were scooped up from the sea.

A memorial for roadkill. A frisbee with a print of a dead pigeon on it, a satirical imagined second chance for the bird to fly. Presented on a bench with a metal plaque with etched text that reads “Bench for bird mourning”.

Wet Nursing is an installation merging humans, animals, and objects to reflect on the human commodification and exploitation of nature; imagining a different reality in which distinctions between human and animal would not exist. Blurring hierarchies and reflecting on those artificial nature-mimicking things we keep in our homes to convince ourselves of our connection to something natural. Installed on the window is a printed sticker of taxidermied bear exhibit in the Senckenberg Naturmuseum Frankfurt. A forest wallpaper installed on a standing wall leans against the real wall. Platforms covered in wood-image printed vinyl hold the sculptures. Presented at the KABK Graduation Show.

A bread loaf topped with finger and toenails instead of seeds, relating to our own discarded body parts as parts that can nurture us.

That which swarms upon the earth is a performance of two parasites, a tapeworm and a scabie, eating and talking inside of a host human’s intestine. The parasites are eating piles of fat and speaking in monologues addressing their host in erotic, codependent, luscious appreciation. “I want to crawl inside of you, I want to eat what’s rotting inside of you. Let me be the insect that infests you.” “Don’t be afraid of the bedbugs, because they’re here to cradle you to sleep.” Imagining the parasitic relationship from the other, nonhuman side.

Performance

Butter is a performance of me covering my skin in a second layer of skin, one that I cannot feel when somebody else tries to take it as their own. It is reconciling with the experience of sexual assault. It is not my real skin, you can take a knife to it, I will not feel it. As I stand covered in my butter skin, I am peeling a lemon. “Peeling open the flower, forcing it to ripen for you”. In the weeks prior to the performance I was collecting a jar of my spit which I carried with me, to spit out myself and anger. The performance was paired with a collection of my writings related to the experience and aftermath of assault in the body, writings on myself and other bodies as lipids that cannot float together.

Still from video