I first came to Jibade-Khalil Huffman's work through his poetry—language fractured and reassembled, dense with rhythm and dissonance. Since then, our conversations and collaborations have unfolded across years and cities, most memorably while walking and looking at art together in New York or working on projects in Portland. My curatorial practice is rooted in relationships like this, ones built over time, shaped by trust, curiosity, and a willingness to sit with complexity. Khalil’s work resists tidy interpretation; it is, quite literally and figuratively, a collage: of somatic memory, image, sound, and language. It is always becoming. I trust this exhibition to unfold in real time—an emergent visual poem within the noise of a long life of looking.
- Kristan Kennedy
JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN x KRISTAN KENNEDY
Kristan Kennedy (KK): I think one of the most important things about your work is that you allow yourself to stay in an editing process until it’s ready. You’re always collecting—mining clips, shooting footage—and building something internally. But you’re also constantly reconstructing as you make. Where are you with that process right now?
Jibade-Khalil Huffman (JKH): I’m just… overwhelmed. Partly because of everything going on in the world right now—it’s impossible not to feel that. I see it in my students, too. They feel this pressure to make work, but also uncertainty about how to do that. When I started teaching full-time, it hit me hard. I’d been stitching together gigs before, but this felt like a real shift. I had a moment with Amanda Ross-Ho where I said, “I don’t feel like I’m an artist anymore.” And she was like, “Yeah, I felt the same way when I started.” That helped.
KK: I remember that feeling when I started teaching, too. You want to create a culture in the classroom, help people connect, and also maintain boundaries. That tension is real.
But teaching also shapes the work. It’s one of the few places—outside of interviews—where you hear yourself say something and think, “Wait, do I believe that?” It’s a loop. That back-and-forth shapes things.
JKH: I love hearing that. It’s affirming. And I think that loop you’re describing—between the classroom and the studio—does bear fruit, even if it’s slow. But it’s also fertile in terms of building resources, collaborations, and research. I have these elaborate ideas I want to pursue and they just take impossible amounts of time, patience, and support to pull off.
KK: You used the word “elaborate,” which really resonates. Your work is complex, but also feels intentional in its economy of means. You’re editing constantly—even while constructing multiple rooms or screens. What does it mean for you to want to make
something “elaborate”?
JKH: It means tension. I’ve never had a big budget, so I’m always choosing: Do I make collage-based objects or a video? The collage works I can almost do for free. But videos—especially if they involve multiple projectors—require equipment.
KK: So how do you deal with the ideas you can’t make yet? Do they marinate? Or do you find a way to work them into what you’re already doing?
JKH: Both. Some ideas I find a stand-in for. Others just wait. I think of it like James Cameron—he had ideas for Terminator 2 that he couldn’t realize until the tech caught up. That takes restraint. Choosing which ideas can wait is its own skill.
KK: Yes it takes resolve… but waiting can allow your idea to live in the future—waiting for the moment to exist… Your installations often choreograph how a viewer moves through space—peepholes, overlapping projections, a circle of chairs. Is there a new spatial logic or emotional atmosphere you’re working with in this new project?
JKH: I had two ideas initially. One was a more improvised installation—a physical response to the last few years, using thrifted materials. But being in New Orleans made that tricky—this place has so many histories. And things like found photographs, which I often use, are hard to find here post-Katrina. So, I shifted.
Now the show centers around two videos: one collage-based and chaotic, and one I’ve been shooting over the past year and a half, blending documentary and performance. The second has a clearer, more linear feel. I’m thinking of the exhibition as moving the viewer from chaos to something more structured, maybe even theatrical.
KK: That reminds me of something Ohad Meromi oncesaid to me: that exhibitions are a kind of passive-aggressive choreography. You’re guiding people, even when they don’t know it. You’re describing a line through space—a kind of arc.
JKH: Yes, totally. I’m still figuring out how the wall text fits into that. It’s something I’ve played with before:using text on the wall as part of the artwork. It shifts from poetic to didactic, or from serious to irreverent. But I’m also working on a book that combines poetry and essay, and the logic of that project is influencing how I think about voice in this video. I’ve been thinking about musicals—how characters just burst into song. That’s helped me understand how those different registers can live together.
KK: Do you still think of montage as a poetic structure?
JKH: That’s where I’m conflicted. I want to include voice in a different way. The text is the only consistent voice in the video—it appears on screen and on the walls. I’m not sure if the text is a narrator, or another character, or an instruction. I’m still figuring that out.
KK: It reminds me of how you’ve talked about interiority—how your work stages consciousness rather than explaining a fixed position. The wall text isn’t about clarity, necessarily. It’s about holding the viewer in that in-between.
JKH: Exactly. I think that tension—between expression and explanation—is core to the work. I don’t want to tie it up neatly. I want to let it be uncertain.
KK: Do you feel pressure to have it all figured out before the show opens?
JKH: Not really. I prefer not knowing. It’s terrifying, but also more interesting. I’d rather spend the time building the work than producing a slick press preview. I don’t want to wrap the work up in a bow for someone else.
KK: You’ve also talked a lot about sound in your work. It feels like music has become a method and metaphor. How are you thinking about sound in this show?
JKH: I’m leaning toward silence, actually. In my collage videos, I’ve often used popular music—sometimes finding the original sample in a Wu-Tang song, for example. But this time, I’m thinking more about erasure—about quiet. Like blocking out the noise, and only lifting your hands from your ears when it feels safe. That’s where I’m at.
KK: I love that. Especially considering you’re pulling samples from TikTok. Those clips have their own cultural memory—people associate them with specific trends or emotions. So embedding them in a new context reshapes them. For some people, they’ll bring up that cultural baggage. For others, it’s a totally new meaning.
JKH: Yeah, exactly. That helps me think about the other video, too. It’s made up of performers across different places, all doing the same repeated act, but we never fully see what they’re building. There’s a heist energy to it. It’s about organizing, movement, and repetition. And putting it next to the TikTok video creates this interesting tension—between the abstract and the real, between structure and spontaneity.
KK: Are the two videos meant to be fractured selves? Or simultaneous logics that speak to each other?
JKH: Maybe both. The wall text is still the missing link. One video is more chaotic and meme-filled, the other is closer to narrative, shot with performers and a kind of work. There’s a kind of purpose to the pacing.
KK: Do you think of wall text as a way to upend the traditional exhibition format? To turn a didactic space into something more poetic?
JKH: Yes, totally. That’s a consistent strategy for me. But in this case, I’m not sure if it’s poetry exactly. It’s something else—something in between. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m chasing it.
KK: That uncertainty is part of what makes your work so compelling. You’re putting a lot of material together, but you’re not handing out easy answers. It’s about creating a space where people can rest in that in-between.
JKH: Yeah. And I’m always trying to keep things moving. Even now, I’m thinking about other forms—like video games—as spaces for that kind of interior exploration. I’m not interested in new forms just for the sake of it. I’m interested in what they allow us to feel or experience differently.
Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer who uses found, archival material and contemporary ephemera to address slippage in memory and language particular to race and visibility. Often working site-specifically, his work takes the form of installation, video, projections, photographic light boxes, and photo collages printed on layered transparencies and paper. Huffman derives much of his practice from the intersection of writing, poetry, found media, and common speech, often cutting, sampling, and shifting bits of video and excerpts of text into new formats. The idea of erasure—of certain voices, people, and idea—as subject matter and as technique is central to his practice, in building up and removing layers of material in his videos and two-dimensional collages.
Huffman’s recent solo institutional exhibitions include Brief Emotion, Frac Bretagne, Rennes, France; You Are Here, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art Charleston, SC; and Now That I Can Dance, Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, MA. Huffman’s work has also been exhibited at museums and institutions including Wexner Center for the Arts, Ballroom Marfa, The Kitchen, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Hammer Museum. Huffman attended Bard College (BA), Brown University (MFA, Literary Arts), and University of Southern California (MFA, Studio Art), is the recipient of numerous awards, and was a 2015-16 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Kristan Kennedy is a Portland-based artist, curator, and educator, and serves as the Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). Kennedy serves on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and teaches Contemporary Art and Critical Thinking at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at Noon Projects, Los Angeles in the exhibition Becoming A Swan, 2024.
A printed version of this interview was published in conjunction with Jibade-Khalil Huffman's exhibition at Other Plans, August - September 2025. Design by Collection of Collections and printed by constance. To receive a copy of this publication, contact us at info@otherplans.gallery.
Special thanks to Cristina Molina, Elena Johnson, SaskiaTeterycz, Ruben Rodriguez, Octavian Studios, and Port Studio for their support of this exhibition.