Felisha Carénage
Yellow Bird (Choucoune)

With Yellow Bird (Choucoune), Felisha Carénage engages with the figure of the Moko Jumbie—a Caribbean stilt-walking spirit guardian with roots in West African traditions. The one-off public performance unfolds on Auguststraße, between KW’s front house and Kunst Raum Mitte, the two institutions hosting the 2025/26 BPA// exhibition, in which the artist participates. Drawing on the song Yellow Bird from the Caribbean musical repertoire, as an invocation, Carénage and Jhawhan Thomas create an embodied sonic interruption. Their personal and historical connections to each other, to Europe, and to their audience unsettle binaries tied to belonging and kinship. A presence both haunting and grounding, the Moko Jumbie glitches Creole memory into Berlin’s public space.

Felisha Carénage (b. 1986, TT) uses performance and expanded painting to explore ethics of empire – wrecking gender, race, language and nationhood using play, noise and bacchanal; the carnivalesque. Her work concerns architectural, legal, and literary interventions, guided by exchange with decolonial feminist initiatives; city walks, critical readings and the development of strategies for civic engagement often accompany her projects. A citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, she currently lives and works between London and Berlin.

Jhawhan Thomas (b. 1980, TT) is an artisan and performer. A frequent carnival King – along with the Queen, the most elaborately costumed figure in a Carnival band’s yearly theme – Thomas has also notably portrayed Ras Nijinksky as Anna Pavlova in ‘The Dying Swan‘ for Peter Minshall, 2016, and and his own interpretation of The Flying Dutchman, 2017, each for Trinidad and Tobago‘s Carnival competition.