Ziare Malik Jordan
readymag.website/5790140Ziare Malik Jordan is an artist and storyteller working across graphic design, photography, mixed media, and installation. His practice employs immersive visual narrative to examine Black life through intimacy, atmosphere, and conceptual rigor. Rooted in Black and queer identity, his work engages spirituality, embodiment, and cultural memory while tracing broader questions of visibility, power, and becoming. Through a refined visual language and layered narrative approach, Jordan constructs works that invite viewers into presence, reflection, and justice.
Church Boy: Reverence. Refusal. Reclamation.
Church Boy: Reverence. Refusal. Reclamation. is the salvation story of a Black trans man unfolding through spiritual awakening. Sequenced in four parts, Inheritance, Reckoning, Death, and Threshold, the work traces a passage through inherited Christian doctrine and its undoing. In doing so, it traces the enduring presence of the Black church in Black childhood, especially in the ways it structures gender, desire, shame, and belonging. The title, Church Boy, reimagines that childhood through a trans masculine lens, positioning boyhood not as a literal past, but as a site of gender reclamation.
Awakening becomes a mode of transition away from religious conditioning and toward a decolonized, self-defined spirituality rooted in ancestry and inner power. Drawing from the photographic languages of Carrie Mae Weems and Dawoud Bey, Church Boy uses intimacy, tension, and deliberate staging to articulate refusal, reverence, and transformation. Here, church is reimagined through ritual, Black trans masculine tenderness, sensuality, and fashion.