Daniella Rose King is a curator and writer based between London and New York, concerned with artistic practices of the Caribbean diaspora with a particular focus on feminist readings of transatlantic geographies and their histories of extraction. She has curated exhibitions and publication projects that address concerns at the intersection of black geographic thought, feminism, and the environment.
Having developed projects with a plethora of institutions including Nottingham Contemporary; iniva, London; Cornerhouse (now HOME), Manchester, and MASS Alexandria, Egypt as well as working with New York-based artists Simone Leigh and Naeem Mohaiemen. She is currently Adjunct Curator of Caribbean Diasporic Art, Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational, where she works closely with the curatorial teams at Tate Modern and Tate Britain. Between 2017-2020 she was the Whitney-Lauder Curatorial fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, where she curated The Last Place They Thought Of, (2018) and Deborah Anzinger: An Unlikely Birth (2019). She was the 2015-16 Whitney Independent Study Program Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow. She holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London.
For her Archipelagos in Reverse Research Network public programme, she explores Tituba, “the black witch”, the first to be convicted in the Salem witch trials in 1692, and asks how we can read her in a transatlantic, anti-capitalist, ecological, black feminist practice. If the witch-hunts are tied to the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, the transformation of the commons, and denigration of communities organised along matriarchal lines; Tituba is an important embodiment of this. How does her narrative confirm and complicate the embroiled history of racial-capitalism, environmental extraction and patriarchy? How do place, plot (Sylvia Wynter), landscape, misogyny, capitalism and witchcraft intersect in this narrative? How does the figure of the black witch/obeah trouble histories of spirituality, resistance, and culture? Thinking though historical records, and speculative renderings of the figure, she explores how Tituba’s narrative speaks to contemporary experiences, understandings, notions of place, environment, belonging, diaspora, resistance, indigeneity, blackness, spiritualism and feminism. Engaging with Wynter’s polemics of the plantation and the plot to explore politics of place as a model for an environmental and ecologically sustainable future in Caribbean landscapes, and McKittrick’s conception of being in the last place they thought of. This project seeks to explore the paradoxical, shifting relationship BIWOC have occupied throughout the Black Atlantic, and how Tituba’s story speaks directly to issues of place, escape, and power.