Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Jibade-Khalil Huffman makes installations, videos, and photo works that use image and text to challenge our understanding of narrative form. Layering text and footage with found media to raise questions of mainstream representation, “The circle” was first presented in 2020 as a multi-screen performance, throughout its genesis the work returns to the question of what it means to think about trauma, who is 'allowed' to speak and what seeing ourselves reflected in various screens means.

In this film, emerging after and alongside the performance of the same name, circular motif’s connect and structure the collaged footage. The film explores the psychic toll of the media while delving more specifically into trauma and the systems of support and coping mechanisms we create in response. Developed over the course of the spring and summer of 2020, amid both pandemic-driven social distancing and nationwide protests for racial justice, The Circle reflects on the layered national and personal trauma of the period through a series of poetic vignettes.