“Blue Birth Beloved” (Still Performance)

by Anique J Jordan


Photography assistants: Erin Howley and Alvis Julian
Dedicated to the memory of Pat Placzek

Anique is a self-confronting, time warping performer using live embodied performance and camera work as mediums. This series is informed by her meditations on black women genealogies, haunting, arrivals, memory and the ways we survive.

Artist Statement

Blue: The blue devil, Jab Molassie is a Trinidadian ole mas carnival character that emerges from our collective resistances and our deliberate decisions to transform.

Beloved: Tony Morrison’s literary personification of Margaret Garner – an enslaved Afrikan womban who killed her eldest daughter, rather then send her back to slavery – rises outta watah. She rises speaking in tongue, she rises to call forward memory, she rises telling us we never forget, the haunting never stops, the haunting never stops.

Birth: A woman seeking, a spirit seeking, a girl; a timeless
oscillation – the greatest sci-fi.
with this memory we learn
Blackness is technology
and we be post human
ghosts and things
haunt us sit
and confront
what happens
when she speaks
does she turn blue?


Anique Jordan is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, scholar and award winning social-entrepreneur. At 19 she founded one of the city of Toronto’s first for youth by youth social enterprises working with over 100 young entrepreneurs. As an artist, her artwork plays with the aesthetics found in traditional Trinidadian carnival and the theory of hauntology to challenging historical narratives and create, what she calls, impossible images. Her art creation processes are guided by the questions: What stories do we tell that go unchallenged? And in how many ways can we know a thing? Anique’s work has taken her to Jamaica, Costa Rica, South Africa, Ecuador, Trinidad and Barbados. She has been mentored by internationally recognized dub poet d’bi. young anitafrika, theatre artist and scholar Honor Ford-Smith and poet Christine Craig.  Anique’s work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Gallery 44, Crossroads Artspace and The Watah Gallery. She is currently working on the manuscript for her first book, Possessed: Black Women, Hauntology and Art as Survival.