Following Mesmerising Tate Modern 25th Anniversary Performance, KaMag Brings Boundary-Pushing Art Performance To São Paulo Biennial This Fall

Acclaimed Cuban artist and academic María Magdalena Campos-Pons–whose interdisciplinary work often explores themes of diaspora, memory, ritual and spirituality–has collaborated with Kamaal Malak, musician, academic and former member of two-time Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group Arrested Development on many boundary-pushing performances. The partners in life and in art collaborated in May this year on I Am Soil. My Tears Are Water–a seminal performance at Tate Modern commissioned in celebration of the museum’s 25th anniversary.

Tate Modern at 25: A Stage for Radical Love

María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Kamaal Malak chose the auspicious occasion of their triumphant performance at Tate Modern’s quarter century birthday to reveal their new artist moniker of KaMag. I Am Soil. My Tears Are Water is a multi-sensory performance merging visual installations with choreographed dance, music, food, flowers, symbolic ritual and bespoke costume to create a sonic, sensory experience performed by KaMag with a troupe of dancers and musicians. Campos-Pons and Malak rose to the auspicious occasion of TATE Modern’s quarter century with an immersive performance that took the audience in the subterranean Tanks on a sensory journey, inviting reflection on universal themes of healing, resilience and transformation. KaMag created a vibrant tapestry of diaspora and spirituality exploring their concept of Radical Love as a regenerative, healing force in a fractured world.

Ritual, Sound, and Storytelling: The Ingredients of KaMag’s Alchemy

Campos-Pons enacted a metaphor of soil nourished by a Mother’s River of Tears with the help of dancers, music and objects, fusing it with a sonic journey composed by Malak to guide audiences through an emotional arc of grief and ultimately of hope. The performance also featured video projections and live drawing curated to create a dialogue with engaging with Tate Modern’s architecture. KaMag adapted their performance for London and Tate, sourcing local talent including choreographer Naz Choudhury and emerging designers Omer Asim and Maya Antoun of OMER ASIM.

Those who missed the epic Tate Modern performance and are keen to experience Campos-Pons’ artwork can view her installation–acquired by Tate from Documenta 14 (2017)–in an exhibition dedicated to 25 works by 25 artists on the occasion of Tate’s 25th birthday, until 24th October, 2025.

I met Maria and Kamaal on a balmy day in London’s Soho, and spoke to them about the experience of performing their seminal Tate Modern performance and how they are pushing the boundaries of performance art at the intersection of music and dance in a bid to foreground the concept of radical love as a force for healing and transformation.

KaMag: A New Creative Union for a New Era

Campos-Pons and Malak were still radiating the positive vibrations released during their Tate performance, and they announced that–after four decades of performance practice–they have made a symbolic merger of their names to KaMag, an anacronym that summarises their vision of spreading radical love through art at a time of great distress and unrest for the world and humanity.

So where did the title I am Soil, My Tears Are Water come from? KaMag explain: “For the past three years we were working on a project and we were both thinking about geography, thinking about the Universe and thinking about energy, and trying to find a sentiment of the time we are living in. So I am Soil, My Tears are Water is almost like a continuation of the idea that grounded us together as creators, as individuals, and collectively thinking together about what are the themes of our time that touch us the most, and how do we want to create ways of communicating that. So we are sensitive to everything that happens around us and open to observe that. The complexities and sometimes the gravitas of events that surround us.”

It seems like the right moment to push a message of humanity and human beings looking after each other and spreading love. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s sad that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were saying this in the 1970s and we are still caught in a cycle of war and destruction, and it’s artists and performers like KaMag who digest and comment on seismic world events through their art–whether it’s painting, drawing, song lyrics, installation or performance–and propose solutions or reactions to the world around us. So what motivated KaMag to conceive the mantra of Radical Love that is the beating heart of every one of their performances?

“In a very complex, challenging world, we are trying to create conduits we want to find restorative powers that allow new things to come. ‘Radical Love’ means how to love each other and how to love everything around us.”

On Influence and Lineage: From Yoko Ono to Yoruba Traditions

Did performance artists such as Ono, Lennon and Marina Abramovic influenced KaMag’s work at all? Maria cites Brazilian performance artist Lydia Clark as an influence as well Felix Gonzalez Torres, the ritualistic healing traditions of Maria’s Cuban Yoriba tradition, and Yoko Ono’s sonic explorations.

María: “Yoko Ono’s sonic explorations were quite visceral and unique. I actually met Yoko Ono in 1989 at Riverside studios in London for the first time. I liked these idea of expanding materiality. But Lydia Clark is my Guru, as a woman who opened up extraordinary opportunities of performativity. And also a lot of the influence for my performance comes from my tradition of Cuba, from the practice of ritual and healing process in the Yoruba school.”

Kamaal composed the musical score for the Tate performance–which has also been performed at other prestigious arts venues such as the Guggenheim in Los Angeles–and cites as an influence John Lennon’s Idea of expanding materiality and the idea of not limiting ourselves to where we are but thinking about where we can go during our performance by using our imagination. Kamaal explains: “In our performance (at Tate) we had images that were meditative, and also we put calming frequencies in the music. Most of them were subsonic, 40khz frequencies that regenerate brain cells. Our friend is a brain surgeon who developed an apparatus that uses subsonic frequencies of music to regenerate the brain cells of people who’ve had strokes, and his work was a big influence on the music I composed for our performances.”

María tells me that through their performance at Tate and in other cultural venues around the world, KaMag are asking “How do we create a path of connections and engagement that is new, and is different? Their response to this question appears to be a fusion of María’s Cuban heritage, Yoruban traditions and multi-disciplinary artistry, with Kamaal’s finely tuned musicality and roots embedded in the Hip Hop scene. This combination of art, performance, ritual, music and dance is sprinkled with a dose of KaMag’s ‘radical love’ and the result is a multi-sensory alchemy that transports audiences to another realm where anything is possible if we project a message of compassion and humanity.

Healing Through Frequency: Music as Medicine

Kamaal says his musical background played a part in the duo’s new manifestation of KaMag: “Music has been a circle. We are in an area where love is kind of corny. Because Hip Hop started from oppression and disruption–in Brooklyn, New York. It started from that grind, and it stayed in that area of struggle, oppression and trying to get your message out. But in the 90s it kind of shifted and we (Arrested Development) had songs like Mr Wendal (about a homeless man) and Tennessee (a kind of prayer song). Then that changed and we had gangsta rap and hip hop. And now, here we are again, we’re at this point–this eclipse–where it’s OK to say certain words that we didn’t say, and we can say ‘let’s do some love songs’. I call our music ‘feel good music’, because we want people to feel good. That’s where we’re at right now with KaMag, and that’s what we want to push–that and Five senses–the taste, the smell, the sound, the touch and the view–that’s what we cover in our performance. All of those senses. And I haven’t seen that kind of performance lately, although it’s out there I’m sure. That’s what we want to push right now, to touch all the senses.”

Final Reflections: Love as Resistance, Art as Renewal

My experience of spending an hour with KaMag–partners in life and in art–was heart-warming. They radiated an infectiously positive aura and I left with a feeling that– despite the overwhelming barrage of the news cycle reporting seemingly perpetual war and conflict–artists with the glass half full mindset of KaMag have the power to change the world for the better, by creating life-affirming art that invites people to look at life through a different lens and manifesting a more inclusive world where we enact positive change through their message of radical love.

From London to São Paulo: An Artistic Journey Continues

Shortly after my meeting with the enigmatic artist duo, it was announced that they will be performing a new version of I Am Soil. My Tears Are Water at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo–titled Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice–taking place from 6th September, 2025 until 11th January, 2026 at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in São Paulo. KaMag seem like a perfect choice for a Biennial whose title is derived from Conceição Evaristo’s poemDa calma e do silêncio. The São Paulo Biennial’s theme is centred around the importance of nature, humanity and of listening–particularly during times of global crisis–and KaMag’s Radical Love sentiment with its humanist roots couldn’t be more timely or more vital.

Commenting on their selection for São Paulo Biennial KaMag said: “This is an amazing opportunity. São Paulo has an extraordinary tradition and we are very grateful for the opportunity. The core theme of the edition is very close to the ideas of our practice. We are bringing a new Performance to São Paulo.”