Rene Matić explores “dimensions of Blackness through the lens of their own personal experiences as a queer, Black womxn”

Born in Peterborough and now based in London, having just completed a BA in fine art at Central Saint Martins, Rene Matić’s portfolio is one well beyond the years of a recent grad. Complex, questioning and spanning an array of media, Rene has already made a name for themself in the art world, exhibiting in myriad shows in the UK and internationally, as well as being selected as one of this year’s Bloomberg New Contemporaries.

Their contribution to New Contemporaries – an exhibition which has long marked a genuine stamp of approval for any emerging artist – is titled There’s been some times on stage when I really felt free. Less of “a work” and just a “documentation of my guy” it comprises clips Rene filmed one evening at their father’s house in Peterborough. Riffing off what Arthur Jafa calls “glamorising” – the idea that Black folk have learnt to perform or “moonwalk” their way out of submission – it speaks to Rene’s father’s ability to do exactly that. The film was created before Rene’s father attempted suicide, after his successful cancer treatment, during his “on-going love affair” with alcohol and in the same week Rene started taking antidepressants. “Black men don’t catch breaks and neither do their brown babies,” Rene writes on the New Contemporaries blog, describing how the film is about “what survival looks like”.

Rene’s portfolio at large explores “the immeasurable dimensions of Blackness through the lens of their own personal experiences as a queer, Black womxn living in the diaspora.” It’s through this that they “combat and question the power relations that pervade the art world and society more widely.” In recent times, that has manifested in an exploration of the Skinhead movement and its beginnings as a “multicultural marriage” between West Indian and white working class culture, and its subsequent co-option by far right white supremacists.

Later this year, at Vitrine in London, Rene will be hosting their first solo exhibition titled Born British, Die British which will debut a new film of the same name. It documents Rene being permanently marked with the words “Born British, Die British,” a tattoo more often associated with and seen on the bodies of far-right, white skinheads. In turn, Rene claims a facet of Britishness which is often denied to them; “the myth of a ‘pure’ and ‘unadulterated’ Britishness.”

In turn, works such as this, as well deeply personal documentations like There’s been some times on stage when I really felt free form a metaphor examining their own experience of living in the Black British diaspora. They also, the artist writes “excavate white jealousy, the continued legacy of colonialism and the fear of a Black planet” – topics which coalesce within their mixed race identity.

INT: Looking ahead, how will you continue to question the power relations that pervade the art world and society?

RM: By existing!!! ...and documenting/archiving that existence.