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Benji Reid – Choreo Photolist: Freezing Time, Defying Gravity

Till Monday 2 June

Laugh at Gravity is an evocative new exhibition from Benji Reid, the renowned choreo-photolist whose genre-defying work sits at the intersection of choreography, photography, and theatrical performance. Presented on digital screens at the Social, this collection is a luminous testament to the power of spirit, defiance, and love—particularly the love between a father and his daughter.

Created during the pandemic—a time of global stillness and personal urgency—these images were born from a fevered need to create. Reid speaks of waking at 4 a.m., compelled by visions hovering just beyond reach, images that floated in the ether until they could be captured and made real. That sense of urgency, of breathless pursuit, infuses every frame.

In Laugh at Gravity, Reid explores what it means to exist in the liminal spaces: between floating and falling, between visibility and invisibility, between strength and fragility. The title itself evokes a central obsession in Reid’s practice—the sensation of weightlessness, the dream of walking on air just shy of the ground. It’s in this space of suspension that his photographs find their emotional charge. Here, gravity loosens its grip, and Black bodies—too often burdened by history, stereotype, and erasure—are offered a rare and radical freedom: the permission to float.

Each image is a story told in silence. Reid’s signature aesthetic blends the mythic and the modern, evoking ancient spiritual figures alongside contemporary urban athletes. His subjects are poised in acts of defiance or reverence, vulnerability or flight. They are at once statuesque and fluid, embodying a tense beauty that invites contemplation. These photographs do not seek to freeze time in stillness—they aim instead to hold the viewer in a suspended moment, a breath caught between past and future.

At the emotional core of Laugh at Gravity is Luna, Reid’s daughter, who is more than a subject—she is a collaborator, a co-conspirator in this visual poetry. Her presence anchors the work and lifts it simultaneously. Through Luna, Reid engages with themes of legacy, lineage, and the delicate passage of emotional inheritance from one generation to the next. These are not just portraits—they are intimate conversations between father and daughter, layered with tenderness, humour, resistance, and hope.

Reid describes his practice as a conversation about visibility and vulnerability. Each photograph becomes both a document of the world as it is and a speculative projection of what it could become. These are psycho-geographical spaces—landscapes of the mind and heart that offer a vision of Blackness that is complex, luminous, and unapologetically expansive.

In Laugh at Gravity, art becomes flight. The screen becomes a portal. And the viewer is invited to enter a space where the physical laws of the world are briefly suspended—and where the soul, unbound, rises.

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