For Willy Love and Booker T:
Blue babies do whatever they want
– new work by Flannery O'kafka
part of the Edinburgh Art Festival

Sierra Metro is delighted to present Flannery O'Kafka - For Willy Love and Booker T: Blue babies do whatever they want, part of the Edinburgh Art Festival programme.

Sierra Metro is transformed into a small soft space to land in brutal times. For Willy Love and Booker T: Blue babies do whatever they want, sees the artist continue their practice in personal portrait photography with an exhibition working intuitively through film, photographs, and site specific installation. Influenced by their experience as a neurodivergent, disabled adoptee, Flannery O’kafka’s childhood bedroom and home studio bleed into Sierra Metro.

Powder blue covers the space in a soft subversion of gender performance, respectability, and the picturing of disability. With a nod to Ozark ancestors (or a pushback, depending), the artist claims agency to do whatever they want. Through film, photographs, and installation, it’s a voluntary spectacle made by and for second-class babies.

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Flannery O’kafka (she/they) is a queer Autistic adoptee artist living and working in Glasgow, graduating from GSA in 2018. Their practice is mostly photographic, but she also works with text & short films, writes filthy poetry, makes zines, and tries hard to stay soft. Born a small-town scandal in the Summer of 1976, O'kafka's work is an emotional document of the search for familiarity and a cumulative clumsy stab at a self portrait (or sometimes a public mourning diary). An interest in amateur museums, passion projects, the medium of the family album, stigmata snapshots, and photography's history of depicting marginalised bodies anchors their work. All work is collaborative in some way and made within a context of care and play and dark comedy. It's maybe mostly about staying alive. O'kafka's images have been shown widely in the UK (including Stills Centre for Photography) as well as internationally (The National Museum Gdańsk, Pinyago Photography Festival, Wunder Der Prärie festival). In 2022 she won the RSA Morton Award for lens-based artists and 3 of their photographs are held in the Scottish Photography collection at City Art Centre in Edinburgh.

flanneryokafka.com

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The #EAF24 programme is now live and takes place in Edinburgh from 9–25 August. The UK’s largest annual festival of visual art is back with a programme that connects the people and city of Edinburgh with global dialogue through a range of exhibitions, commissions, performances and events.  This year, EAF celebrates its 20th Birthday and invites audiences to join in a moment to pause, and consider how we have arrived here. EAF24 will reflect on the conditions under which we live, work, gather and resist.

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Full programme: edinburghartfestival.com

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