In Moko Is Future, a stilt dancer walks through Copenhagen before the city has properly awakened. The streets are almost empty. The dancer is dressed in colour, elevated above the pavement, impossible to mistake for an ordinary passerby. The camera holds the figure vertically, a shape within a shape, while buildings that ordinarily describe a familiar capital become the scenery of another history. The neighbourhood was made by a city with a colonial past. The visitor on stilts comes from an Afro-Caribbean tradition that survived that past. The encounter takes place in the present, yet the work's title insists on the future.
That insistence is central to Jeannette Ehlers. The Copenhagen-based artist of Danish and Trinidadian descent has spent decades making photographs, video, sculpture and performance that interrupt Denmark's habit of presenting its colonial history as distant or marginal. In her work, an Afro can rotate like a planet. Braided hair can seem to grow out of a building. A figure associated with Caribbean carnival can reclaim a Danish street. These gestures create more than illustrations of historical injustice. They give Black presence a scale, duration and freedom of movement that the official account has often denied it.
Ehlers has been precise about the place of Afrofuturism in that practice. Discussing the video We're Magic. We're Real. #3 with BOMB in 2021, she described her interest in Sun Ra and an “Afrofuturistic touch”: shimmering capes designed by the Rwandan artist Dady De Maximo. The capes matter because they are worn, moved and seen, not simply cited. They join braids, ties and poetry by Lesley Ann Brown in a work whose images refuse to keep history, adornment and speculative identity in separate rooms. Ehlers uses the costume to change what a body can project. The person wearing it is neither an emblem of past suffering nor an anonymous figure in an imagined tomorrow. She is visibly here, made strange and radiant by the possibility of another relation to time.
A spirit above the street
The twelve-minute video Moko Is Future was commissioned for Ehlers's 2022 exhibition Archives in the Tongue: A Litany of Freedoms at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Its dancer invokes Moko Jumbie, the stilt-walking spirit of Caribbean carnival whose origins, in the account on Ehlers's site, connect West Africa to the Caribbean. The figure looks out for a community. Ehlers gives that protective presence a new route across the Atlantic. Instead of appearing only in a Caribbean street during carnival, Moko Jumbie crosses Copenhagen's old colonial neighbourhoods at dawn.
The elevation is practical and symbolic at once. Stilts let a performer see and be seen above everyday traffic. They make the human body less predictable without hiding its human effort. A step requires balance. The figure is precarious and commanding in the same instant. In an empty street, the dancer's arrival changes the relative size of everything around it. Facades that normally dominate the pedestrian begin to look like witnesses. It is a modest alteration of scale with an unusually large historical charge.
The vertical format reinforces that charge. Ehlers could have filmed the old neighbourhood as a broad panorama and made its architecture the principal subject. Instead, the frame follows a tall, moving body. Even when the buildings remain visible, the composition gives the stilt dancer the axis of the image. The city is no longer merely a setting that Black history must fit inside. The visitor sets the measure. This is one reason the film's future feels concrete rather than ornamental: a body moves through a known place and compels the place to receive it.
The work also holds together meanings that Western museum language frequently pulls apart. Ehlers's account of Moko Jumbie connects carnival, protection, masking and spiritual transformation. The figure carries memory of enslaved Africans who created their own carnival traditions under colonial rule. It does not arrive as a tidy historical reenactment. It arrives as an active spirit in a European city. The film asks what happens when a tradition formed through survival is allowed to speak to the conditions of the place that profited from that survival's necessity.
The title uses the future tense almost like a direction. Moko does not travel to Copenhagen to prove that the past existed. The dancer comes to act in the city now, to watch over it, and to imagine repair where the old order left a wound. Repair is not promised as a completed event. The dancer's passage is temporary. By morning, ordinary routines will resume. Yet the image remains as evidence that the streets can be occupied by other stories and other kinds of authority.
Hair as an architecture of relation
In the evolving series We're Magic. We're Real, Ehlers repeatedly makes hair into a structure that connects bodies, buildings and generations. One branch of the project, These Walls, uses performers whose long cornrows appear to grow from the facades of buildings associated with colonial histories. In performances the artists move slowly away from and toward the walls. Their braids become visible lines of tension. They evoke both intimate practices of care and the ropes and rigging of Atlantic ships.
The effect depends on duration. A still photograph can show the arrangement, but a performance lets the lines change as people walk. Distance stretches them. A turn redirects them. The building seems less inert because the bodies attached to it keep moving. The performers cannot erase its history, but neither can the facade stand as an untouched authority. The connection is uncomfortable and deliberate. It makes visible the historical labour and extraction that monumental architecture so often conceals.
Ehlers has presented These Walls at several sites, including Kunsthal Charlottenborg in 2022, Fisk University's Cravath Hall, and a performance in Venice in 2026. The geography matters. The same formal device changes when the building and audience change. In Venice, the nearby water and maritime history altered the resonance of the braids. At Fisk, students and members of Nashville's Afro-diasporic community were among the participants. The work is therefore neither a fixed symbol nor a portable lesson with identical meaning everywhere. Its lines must be remade by people in a particular place.
Another version, From Sunset to Sunrise, brought five Black female performers into a Danish forest, joined by a constellation of cornrows. Among them were Ehlers herself, Julienne Doko, Trine Drechsler, Wanjiku Victoria Seest and Mai Takawira. The setting is crucial. A forest is neither the civic facade nor the museum wall. The braids can still register a shared past, but the surrounding trees open the composition toward ecology, refuge and a different understanding of kinship. The human connection extends through a living landscape rather than across stone.
In these works hair is not treated as a decorative shorthand for identity. Braiding takes time, touch, patience and often trust. It is a practice through which skill moves between people. When Ehlers enlarges it to architectural proportions, she lets that intimate labour alter the scale of a public site. A cornrow becomes a line that can traverse a square. A group of women becomes a structure more persuasive than the official monument behind them. The future in these images begins with a relationship already being made.
The labour inside a curtain
Secret Pathways to Freedom, made with the Detroit artist Halima Cassells and local residents, offers a quieter but no less demanding account of that labour. The installation is made of synthetic braided hair and charms. The many braids hang together like a heavy curtain. Ehlers's description suggests the possibility of a hidden door. The work can be read as a threshold, but its material insists that a threshold does not appear by magic. Many hands made it.
The braiders are not necessarily visible when the completed object is installed. Their absence from the final view is part of its force. A viewer sees the repeated strands and can infer the hours of gathering, separating, crossing and fastening that produced them. The curtain's density comes from cumulative action. Its apparent softness is not slightness. The work has weight and can occupy a room decisively while retaining the trace of individual gestures.
Collaboration changes the meaning of freedom here. Freedom is not a door through which a solitary heroic figure simply walks. It is formed in the meetings and shared handiwork that allow the curtain to exist. The installation connects a speculative image of passage with the social conditions of making. It invites a viewer to stand before an apparent opening and think about the people who constructed its possibility.
This is also why the charms matter. They resist a purely formal reading of the braids as pattern. Each small addition can carry a protective or personal charge without the work requiring a single key to decipher it. Ehlers has often used direct imagery, as she told BOMB, while keeping several meanings alive in the same frame. The curtain exemplifies that balance. Its form is immediately legible. Its history of assembly and its possible destination remain open.
A monument with two makers
Ehlers's work with La Vaughn Belle on I Am Queen Mary offers a different kind of passage from history into public space. Unveiled in Copenhagen in 2018, the sculpture honours Mary Thomas, a leader in the 1878 labour uprising in the former Danish West Indies. It was made through a collaboration between two artists whose bodies and histories meet across the Atlantic. The sculpture's account on Ehlers's site describes an allegorical fusion rather than a simple portrait. Its subject is specific, and its form refuses the idea that historical representation must be a neutral likeness.
The placement in front of the former West Indian warehouse is integral. A monument to a woman who resisted plantation power confronts a building connected to the commercial system that depended on that power. The work does not ask the public to travel to a specialist exhibition to find the relationship. It installs the question in the urban landscape. Copenhagen's harbour becomes a site where the city must meet a figure previously absent from its monumental self-image.
The collaboration matters as much as the site. Belle, from the U.S. Virgin Islands, brought a relationship to the place once governed as the Danish West Indies; Ehlers brought her Danish and Trinidadian position and longstanding work on Scandinavian colonial memory. Neither is interchangeable with the other. Their joint sculpture makes that transatlantic relation part of its method. It resists a familiar public-art pattern in which a European institution commissions an image of colonial history while keeping the descendants of that history at the edge of the process.
I Am Queen Mary and Moko Is Future use very different tempos. One holds a public position; the other passes through the streets in a twelve-minute video. One represents a named historical leader; the other brings a mythic guardian into contemporary Copenhagen. Both change who is allowed to stand above the ordinary scale of the city. In Ehlers's hands, height can belong to a statue or to a performer balanced on stilts. It announces an altered hierarchy of attention.
Motion against erasure
The public force of Ehlers's art did not begin with the monument. In Whip It Good, she performs with a whip, charcoal and a white surface, making colonial violence impossible to file away as a finished episode. Discussing the work with BOMB, she explained why she chose charcoal instead of paint: the material carries associations with extraction, coal and the stages of diamond formation. Its black mark accumulates. What appears on the surface has been made through repeated action rather than through a single illustrative image.
The violence of the whip is confrontational, and Ehlers does not soften it into an agreeable metaphor. At the same time, the performance changes the position from which that violence is seen. The artist holds the instrument. The work asks an audience to witness both the historical brutality it recalls and the agency of the person who determines its contemporary use. This agency is neither an easy reversal nor a promise that artistic action can repair historical harm by itself. It is a demand that the body previously treated as an object of colonial accounting become an active maker of the image.
That attention to agency also helps explain the different moods of her later work. A cape can shimmer, a braid can connect, and a spirit can dance without forgetting the systems against which those gestures are made. Ehlers does not assign joy to a future free of history and pain to a past already closed. Her images allow pleasure, anger, care and remembrance to share space. Their complexity comes from refusing a single emotional instruction.
The Black female body has been a recurring material and subject for Ehlers. She told BOMB that centring Black female existence in Europe was a way to make a presence unavoidable. Her photographs and performances often begin with that visibility, then complicate it. A body can be present and still be read through an inherited stereotype. It can be photographed and still be denied a history. Ehlers changes the surrounding visual grammar through scale, repetition, costume, collective action and setting. The body does not simply enter the frame; it reorganizes the frame.
The Afro that takes up space
Krull's account of Southnord Artfest described encountering Ehlers's We're Magic, We're Real #2 in Stockholm as a giant Afro spinning on its axis. The review notes both the work's physical invitation and the warning against touching it. That tension is sharp. The object commands attention, but attention does not grant possession. An Afro has often been read in public as available for unsolicited commentary or contact. Enlarged and set in motion, it becomes an emphatic presence with its own terms.
Rotation is a simple mechanism with a complicated effect. The shape does not settle into a single fixed profile. It turns and takes up air around itself. From one angle it can look sculptural, from another almost planetary. Its scale denies the convention that Black hair must be managed into visual modesty to be accepted by a room. Yet the work remains recognizably hair, with the social histories that recognition brings. The sculpture does not escape the politics of touch; it makes them impossible to ignore.
In the Southnord exhibition, the piece was part of a gathering of artists with different practices and different relationships to Nordic and African-diasporic life. Ehlers's contribution did not stand for all of them. Its specific visual argument concerned space, movement and the dignity of a form that has often been regulated. Seen beside her braided installations, the turning Afro shows how many directions her hair works can take. One form rotates independently; another binds people to one another and to architecture. Both challenge the idea that hair is too private or ordinary to change a public room.
A future with a location
Afrofuturism in Ehlers's work is not an escape from Copenhagen or from the Caribbean past carried into it. The future is attached to a street, a wall, a forest, a monument site and the people who gather there. It may arrive through spectacular costume, but it is sustained by ordinary acts of making: braiding, rehearsing, walking, balancing, remembering, collaborating. Each act changes a relationship between a body and a place.
The stilt dancer in Moko Is Future provides the clearest image of that method. It is easy to describe the figure as otherworldly. The film's harder proposition is that its world is precisely this one. Copenhagen's buildings are not invented; its colonial connections are not invented. What changes is the direction of arrival and the authority of the visitor. The guardian who crosses the Atlantic is not a relic sent back to authenticate an archive. Moko walks forward, above the pavement, into the city that must now decide what kind of future can fit between its walls.