An argument toward why we need more room for ‘Experimental Black Weird’ and less room for the collapse between ‘Black’ and ‘abject’ within the Great White Box. Here’s to facing our fears.

It’s Just a Fucking Opening leads us with accuracy into the socio-psychic lived experiences of young Black artists and cultural workers. It drops us into the performative and soul extractivist economy that can be “the art world” and its social event climaxes like exhibition openings.

While watching the film, I heard the humming of these luminous words by Frantz Fanon, written long ago but that still resonate today: “I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.”

Unraveling the contemporary artist’s deepest dilemmas, this film portrays intimate, necessary, funny and forever unresolved conversations about art, survival and becoming.
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Like a chorus, bursts of hand-held camera footage punctuate the story with a tactile warmth and texture, expanding the crisp immediacy of the digital to encompass a necessary timelessness. Holding a mirror to the Black artist and the world they move through, this film captures this era - our era - with a piercing honesty and a profound depth.
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More than a film, It’s Just a Fucking Opening is a luminous witness to what it means to be young, Black and making art in Chicago and across the world today. Immortalising and immaculate, it stands as a modern classic.