Rene Matić’s, Many Rivers, 2022. 'I have found home in my dad’s skinhead roots, because once upon a time, identifying as a skinhead represented unity between Caribbean and British culture.’ Photograph: Courtesy of the artist

A video following their father, Paul, a black skinhead, is the centerpiece of this young trailblazer's solo performance; it is cheerful, emotional, and unexpected.

The far-right statement "Born British Die British" was tattooed on the back of the teenage artist Rene Mati two years ago. They then asked one of their idols, the renowned street photographer Derek Ridgers, to create an elegiac black-and-white shot of them, and the words flow over their muscular shoulders in a delicate typeface. His early work with skinheads in the 1970s and 1980s caught a brawny tribal spirit often fueled by extreme ideologies. The slogan becomes much more than a battle cry for oppressed white males when it is inked on a Black lesbian body. According to Mati, "[the tattoo] was always about the transitional periods between being born British and dying British." That is the main theme of my tale, I said.

Skinhead culture is "the perfect metaphor for talking about West Indian and white working-class culture — my culture," according to the artist, whose origins are when white and British Jamaican youth danced together to ska and reggae. The theme of the 25-year-first old's significant solo exhibition of their video, photography, and sculpture, Upon This Rock, at the South London Gallery, is the skinhead emblem. Crosses and flags, the primary symbols of nationhood and religion, are also true.

"My whole life with my dad has been tortured by the ambiguity of his past" -Rene Matić