360 Dome Cinema Screening of The Third Way Film, 2020
Chillout Culture (2012 - 2020) is a series of photographic works unraveling the underbelly of London’s nightlife in domestic, intimate settings. Through these photographs, Iyasu toys with the hyperlocal to develop a welcoming spatiality nested within pockets of large cities like London. Many of these portraits cradle roaming identities, driven by the desire to situate themselves into a safe space after hours of indulgence, raving, and escapism.
Makda Iyasu (b. 1985) is a London-based artist, photographer, and filmmaker. Iyasu’s documentary and ethnographic works foreground communities from across the globe, including queer cultures from Brazil and the UK. Having worked in a range of production and creative direction settings, Iyasu developed a unique, seductive visual language that conveys socially charged topics in a playful and radical way.
Presented her works at
Candid Interiors, Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery,
Redchurch, Street, Oct 2012
Candid Interiors, Öff-beat // Hoxton Docks,
Shoreditch, Dec 2012
Candid Inferiors, George and Dragon,
Shoreditch, Dec 2012
Juliana Sissons, Visionary Knitwear, Fashion & Textile Museum,
Bermondsey Street, Jan 2015
The Third Space, Ridley Road Social Club,
Dalston, Oct 2020
Multimedia Encounters, Multimedia Anthropology Lab,
UCL, Virtual, Feb 2021
Makda Iyasu’s multidisciplinary practice is an intimate navigation of race and gender, uncovering and documenting identities that are otherwise unseen. Iyasu’s work is not only a documentation of ‘marginality’ — it engenders spectacles of transgression and emancipation, exhausting the very notion of ‘marginality’ by creating a manifold dimension of queerness.
Iyasu’s works are unbridled expressions of queering materiality, forming a transmedial that refuses reduction into one, singular medium. The aesthetic boundaries of exhibited works are leaky: projections and household objects become expanded sites for Iyasu’s video work. In previous iterations of ‘The Third Space’, the work ‘Bathroom Stories’ (2010-2012) was projected onto a bath, transforming the mundane object into a bearer of female identities. By unfastening the medium, Iyasu simultaneously exposes the construction of realities where sexual and racial categories are taken as a given.
‘The Third Space’ is an exhibition that probes into this dimension, flirting with the liminality of bathrooms, chill-outs, festivals, and imagined spaces through four different projects. It demonstrates how spatialised encounters can foster unprecedented conversations on the category of race and gender, transforming it into a performance rather than a prescription. The works adapt polemic concepts into elastic entities that are sexy, subversive, and personal. In particular, ‘Mx Chiquita’ (2018-2020) reinscribes the tension between two celebrations in Brazil — the Círio de Nazaré religious procession and the Chiquita party of gender fluidity — into a silent film with a vision of acceptance and tolerance. These playful negotiations allow subcultures to reclaim their modes of representation, foregrounding their position as subjects that simultaneously destroy and develop realities.
Anna Mladentseva
UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab
Makda’s work incorporates over ten years of documentary work, constitutes a sustained ethnographic investigation into deconstructed gender identities, working with communities who sought to carve out other concepts of gender and create spaces where alternative gender identities can be lived and explored freely.
These spaces that Makda has explored - which broader society considered marginal - perform important cultural work. They provide spaces where established social concepts can be challenged, and where alternative visions of society can be experimented with and enacted. These spaces open up different possibilities of what society can be, and who we can be, and the roles we can play within it, and as a result, they offer us new visions of a future that are not defined by the constraints of the past.
Through Makda’s sustained exploration of these spaces, we can learn about more than just the deconstruction of gender. By exploring communities that have sought to challenge accepted social identities such as man, woman, and the societal expectations that come with them. Makda offers insights into how other social categories and identity roles can be questioned and rethought.
The Third Space immerses and invites you to consider the other spaces which remain undefined that can be carved out at the interstices of thought, and which can offer new ways with which to think about the society that we live in, and the future society that we are all creating.
Raffaella Fryer-Moreira
UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab
Features Princess Julia, Cozette McCreery, Billie JD Porter, Harriet Verney, Bella Gladman, Venus X, Scarlette Carlos Clark, Angel Rose.
Bathroom Stories (2010 - 2012) is a 30-minute video installation based on women sharing their spontaneous stories and opinions within the confines of a bath. Its agency transforms the bath into an expanded field for struggles on mental health, interpersonal relationships, and cultural identity. Iyasu allows vulnerability and admiration to clash, producing an entanglement of the body and object. By reflecting on the ordinary aspects of life, ‘Bathroom Stories’ fosters identification in an unexpected shared space.
Anna Mladentseva
UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab
Mx Chiquita (2018 - 2020) is an 11-minute silent film confronting the sediments and exclusionary histories of Círio de Nazaré — an annual religious procession of Brazil in honour of Mary the Lady of Nazareth. Iyasu documents the emergence of Chiquita — a parallel celebration of gender fluidity, acceptance, and reclamation of urban space. By juxtaposing scenes of the Catholic tradition with markers of queerness, Iyasu is inserting the community into a space of permanence and cultural significance. The silent nature of the film concentrates the viewer’s attention onto the visual, transforming the interviews into an assertion of existence that goes beyond words.
Anna Mladentseva
UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab
3D design by Sam Aldridge, music by Nonothing with a spatial audio soundtrack designed by Axel Drioli. Produced by Carlos de Castro, featuring Sierra and Fryercock.
The Third Way Room (2019 -2020) is a 5-meter immersive dome, screening, and a 6-minute 360-degree film with spatial audio. It presents the viewer with a geometrical encounter where the horizon is exploded into a series of possibilities, re-orienting the axis of sexuality away from compulsory heteronormativity. By transforming scenes of queer intimacy into deconstructed polygons, planes, and particle systems, Iyasu conjures up a new physical reality of unprecedented control over one’s body. Phrases ‘creatures of lust’, ‘love in the future, ‘being different’ and ‘why should we believe in fixed constructs of any kind of reality?’ pan across the dome in an attempt to liberate language; turning it into a substance of individual expression and collective emancipation.
Anna Mladentseva
UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab
Mx Chiquita (2021) in VR, Multimedia Encounters, UCL
Makda Iyasu’s immersive exhibition ‘Mx Chiquita’, aims to navigate the longstanding struggles of queer liberation in contemporary Brazil, with an exploration of gender fluidity in the Amazon.
The showcase provides an intimate insight into the themes of marginality and space and strives to construct a new realm for thinking more deeply about the relationship between people and environments.
Iyasu’s room consists of a futuristic backdrop behind a series of intimate interviews, simulating a grand billboard experience that transfigures the ordinary into powerful visual imaginaries.
A unique perspective is enabled as the viewer is transported into the story of a 40-year-old resistance party existing alongside the Catholic celebrations of Círio de Nazaré in Brazil. ‘Mx Chiquita’ balances colourful devotional objects, and plunges the onlooker into a realm of queer emancipation through an invigorating utilisation of space.
Makda Iyasu is a London-based artist who explores intersections of gender whilst transcending traditional boundaries of media through multidisciplinary modes of communication. Her practice spans mediums such as photography, film, and physical installation. Iyasu aims to communicate the importance of connectivity and solidarity by exploring socially charged topics in a playful and radical way. In 2020, Iyasu presented her solo show titled ‘The Third Space’, where she lived up to her practical capabilities through the multifaceted demonstration of her idiosyncratic seductive visual language.
MAL, Multimedia Anthropology Lab
Educational Research Center, Interdisciplinary research network. Experimenting with multimedia methods
Aykut Mercan was featured in the exhibition with his works that take the chill out’s enchanted reality outside the party room. The artist reveals the kinky side of certain planet fucking companies, by looking at their iconic logos with the same high libido.
''When people enter a chill-out, they leave the bitter reality of daily life behind. At least for a while. Under the influence, all the laws, rules, regulations, norms that “chill out mates” taught become irrelevant. They go back to their “factory settings” and start caring only about “simple” pleasures like dancing, laughing, talking, crying, sweating. Also, during these gatherings, people discover how to look at each other differently. No one sees a doctor, teacher, butcher, or banker during chill-out sessions, as party-goers do not represent their daily life personas at the party. This label-free society makes them feel more equal, and they mean nothing else than a play date to each other.''
Aykut Mercan, Goldsmiths University
Communication Mass Communication Media Studies
CONTENT CREATION
CASTINGS
DESIGN + DIGITAL
PHOTOGRAPHY + VIDEO
Sacred and Profane meet.
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
On the second Sunday of October, more than two million Catholic pilgrims descend in Belem, Pará, for the procession of Our Lady of Nazareth. After the procession, tens of thousands of queers, drag queens, and the trans community celebrate it up at the Chiquita Party in celebration of pride.
Transamazonia is an intimate look at an undocumented queer movement in contemporary Brazil.
Now titled Mx Chiquita
Bathroom Stories is a superb example of aesthetic values disorder. By immersing yourself in this intimate place par excellence (number two behind the toilet) but open to the general public by these great voyeurs that are photographers and filmmakers. What becomes of the body in this paradox of manufactured naturalness, of the intimate revealed, of controlled letting go? A questioning of the body is both ridiculous and an object of worship. The body, this pure mechanics that have become art, Makda Iyasu has not finished mistreating it and sending it back to what Lacan could have called a signifier that has become signified.
AURÉLIEN POIRSON-ATLAN
MAKDA IYASU
Across photography and video, Makda's transgressions of the traditional boundaries of media and culture reflect the many facets of her own artistic formation. Makda creatively applies multimedia, champions talent, and creates memorable digital experiences.
DESIGN+ MARKETING
MAKDA IYASU
Makda's expertise lies in combining creativity and insights applied from in-depth knowledge and networks to market brands and startups working in the competitive digital space.