Collective Study Presents k-os Joyful Rebellion
About the event
Collective Study: k-os’ Joyful Rebellion positions Joyful Rebellion as a sonic theory of Black Canada. An album that refuses fixed categories, moves between genres, and creates its own language for Black creative freedom and cultural belonging.
Part lecture, part listening session, part living room, the event brings together artists, critics, DJs, scholars, writers, and cultural workers to study how Joyful Rebellion challenged the borders placed around Black Canadian music. This Collective study will be lead by artist/designer Ian Kamau where he will focus on what K-os’ Joyful Rebellion still teaches us now and asks what this album makes possible: how it uses genre as a tool for freedom, how it moves between musical traditions, how it resists fixed expectations of Black Canadian identity, and how it opens up a more layered understanding of Black creativity in this country.
Audiences will be invited to listen again to this album, or to hear it for the first time, through an understanding of Black Canada as plural, improvised, unfinished, and always in motion.
Ian Kamau - Speaker
Ian Kamau is an artist, writer, and designer from Toronto. He has released seven music projects including the self-produced album One Day Soon (2011) and has published articles, short stories, and poems in publications by Vice, Coach House Press, and Book Thug. He has created short films including Non-Essential (2021) and We Went Out (2022) and a multi-media performance called Loss through The Theatre Centres residency program that was mounted at The Luminato Fest 2023 and at the Under The Radar Festival with the Apollo in New York City in 2025. The son of pioneering filmmakers he was the founding executive director of Nia Centre for the Arts, has a Bachelor in Design and a Masters in Environmental Studies from York University, and a Masters in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University. He currently sits on the OCAD University Cultural Policy Hub advisory and is the 2026/2027 Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University College, University of Toronto.
