Special thanks to Irene Revell, Lina Džuverović and Anne Hilde Neset, Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot, Georgina Orgill, Hannah Grout, Jacqueline Winston-Silk, Lori E. Allen, Karen Di Franco, Gaia Giacomelli, Egg Agency and the University Archives and Special Collections Centre for their support. Thank you also to all the practitioners who have contributed their time and work to this exhibition, a full list can be found under ‘contributors’.
Curated by Sauren Blaney, Katherine Borchsenius, Olivia Bright, Chih-Chun Chan, Dana Chan, Di Chen, Amy Louise Comis, Eleanor Daw, Diane Feng, Eve Fiertag, Maria Figueroa Andrade, Siqin Gong, Yetian Gu, Jelly Guo, Paula Gurbindo Perez, Ran He, Shanhu Hu, Joe Jefford, Lanxi Jiang, Ailbhe Kelleher, Ewa Kwasniewska, Weiqi Li, Yadi Li, Jacob Lomas, Shunyu Luo, Amy Melling, Benedita Menezes, Yi Wang, Wen Jie Meng, Linda Michelle Mognato, Seowon Nam, Anna Nesterenko, Dominique Nok, Aída Palma Corredera, Lily Reddie, Xinyu Ren, Rebecca Sangs, Alina Savina, Jessica Slater, Jiajun Sun, Yueying Sun, Zheng Wan, Jess Wan Ka Po, Yaxuan Wang, Le Wang, Sandrine Welte, Xinyi Zhong, Xiaotong Zhou, Qinru Zhou.
Mapping Intersectionality as Infrastructure features LI YILEI with their art piece appearing on the ticket space. Li’s works constantly examines the discriminatory perception of the world’s phenomena in its subtlest terms, exploring the inaudible and diaspora body, as well as the practice of non-hierarchical listening.
LI YILEI’s work ‘H.A.T.C.H’ (Hatching from the wondrous trance I lay), will be featured as a video piece together with a part of an interview conveyed during the preparations for this exhibition.
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Sound Check is presenting the ticket as a digital zine, and features illustrations by DJ Anu Ambasna, an interview with Nzinga Soundz and a conversation between Shalikah Walters and Ora Ataguba of Sable Radio to collectively question ‘Is DIY dead?’. Clarke’s Presentism and Sonic Territories questions what we want the world to sound and feel like. Ambasna’s An Ode to da Club, created during the 2020 lockdowns, longingly celebrates the joys of collective experience on nightclub dancefloors.
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Sound systems are at a crossroads; they face increasing academic attention but mounting costs and regulations challenge their persistence within communities. As the UK’s longest-running all-women sound system, DJs Ade and Junie’s set champions women in music and explores the scene’s complex identity.
For Sound Check, Nzinga Soundz will perform an hour-long set of reggae, soul and dub inspired by the parties and festivals where sound system’s DIY culture emerged.
Go to the Twitch channel
Anu Ambasna is a British Indian illustrator, broadcaster and DJ from London. Her illustration work acts as a diary, drawing from personal experiences, conversations and the depths of her imagination. Previously a resident DJ at Balamii and BBC Asian Network, she now holds a monthly slot on NTS.
Ora Ataguba is a DJ, promoter, creative producer and co-founder of Sable Radio. Ora’s creative practice stems from serving, platforming and centring marginalised communities in the music industries
Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S) are a London based collective. Building on sound system culture, they aim to bring together a community of queer, trans and non-binary black and POC involved in art, sound and activism. Collective Hum, 2019 (LUX, 6m44) explores the ‘collectivity in the desires, motivations and stories that foreground the histories and present(s) of Black British Sound’. The piece uses multiple narrations and sound clips to create a polyphonic score, which soundtracks footage of collective gestures, movement and bodies. In Collective Hum no one voice nor body is privileged above another.
Jenny Brady is an artist based in Dublin, working with the moving image to explore ideas around translation, communication and the relationship between sound, speech and meaning. She was the inaugural IMMA 1000 artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and is a studio artist at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin.
Cairo Clarke is a curator, writer and facilitator whose work is informed by an urgency for slowness, a re-imaging of pace, production and relationships across arts and cultural spheres, taking an intersectional and collaborative approach.
Libby Deaux is a multimodal artist who works within visual art, performance, and drag. Their work speaks towards a queer identity and experience within the modern world. Working within direct visual and sound influences, they manage to encompass the queer scene into provoking and facetious imagery which tends to resonate with many audiences.
Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. Duplan is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. As an independent curator, he has facilitated artist projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. Why Does It Feel Natural to Want to Be Stable for the Lady in the Mirror is one of the 3 film works from “A POEM BY AN DUPLAN”, a set of three video-poems. And it’s an experiment in melding the video screen with the page-of-text, the videos feature a line-by-line feed of three of Duplan’s poems.
Janine Francois is a Black British Feminist, Critic and Writer and is known for her insightful, critical but piercing perspectives on race and social justice. Janine’s practise deconstructs whiteness (and race) within cultural and academic institutions by way of writing, curating/ producing, research, teaching and consultancy
Okun Song is identification across mixed realities – ‘Between the Two my Heart is Balanced’ by Lubaina Himid, ‘There must be an angel’ by Eurythmics and the Yoruba myth of the Olokun – god/goddess from the sea. Okun Song was commissioned by A- – -Z. (from LUX).
“IndoorGoblin is a minder of my inner fantasy realms. It’s a character my brain created to express. I enjoy exploring the mystical worlds of the imagination, and love inviting others to join me.” As a songwriter, Sumita combines poetry with visual ideas and sounds, including piano, paintbrush, pencil, pixel-pointer, plasticine and other materials. IndoorGoblin is a vehicle for expressing these ever-changing worlds in new ways, and they are not afraid to embrace each idea as it appears
An artist based in London, Rebecca Lennon works across media including video, text, performance, sound and music to think about and play with the non-linear shapes and rhythms of the voice, memory and the speaking body. Exhibiting internationally, across contemporary art and experimental music platforms, radio and recently, publishing, Rebecca graduated from the Slade School of Art London MFA in 2010 and is a visiting lecturer at universities such as Arts University Bournemouth and Royal College of Art.
NVSHU女术 meaning “women’s skill” started in Shanghai, China as a DJ workshop, focused on teaching women and those in the local queer community how to DJ. Asian Eyez and Amber Akilla, both multi-disciplinary in their creative practices, continued to steer the project in new directions, maintaining an open and fluid approach with an aim to connect, inspire and engender a rebellious and fearless attitude into the work and spaces they create. NVSHU女术 has collaborated with various artists including LGBTQIA+ activist/artist Wonton Witch; Umfang, co-founder of record label Discomwan and LA-based AR artist Jenny Yoo on their own Instagram filter inspired by the heart sutra. The project has also worked with brands including Nike and Red Bull with features in NOWNESS, Paper Magazine and L’Officiel.
Nzinga Soundz was established in the early 1980s by Lynda Rosenior-Patten and June Reid. The sound has played at concerts, corporate events and community-based events across the UK and in the Gambia, Barbados and Sierra Leone. Rosenior-Patten and Reid have also presented papers at conferences at Goldsmiths University, the University of East Anglia, and Birmingham City University
Nicol Parkinson is a non-binary sound artist whose research area is sound in Live Art in the 1970s.
Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson is a practising live artist and frequently works as a dramaturg for contemporary performance makers. They teach as an associate lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths.
Pink Suits Band are a Non-Binary, Queer Feminist Punk Rock & Rage duo based in Margate, UK. Formed in 2017, they make loud aggressive political punk noise as well as dance, physical theatre, film and art. The written piece called Noise is… by Pink Suits Band expresses their creative and thoughtful response to Her Noise project. From the form and context of what is noise and how it can be heard, Pink Suits Band incorporates the noise into both their bodily feelings and emotional experience to engage with a non-binary discourse and sincere empathy while encountering cultural discrepancies.
Himali is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. The video work How to startle the unbelieving is an erasure of what’s left of the only archive about an Indian girl who was used by the British Empire as a clairvoyant to travel to the Arctic in search of Franklin and his lost men. Underlying Himali’s voice, in which text has been cut up to make noise, is the shattering of ice crystals, morse code, and her friend JJ Weihl playing the theremin.
I devise performances, often using movement and sound.
I like making work the audience can participate in.
I like learning and teaching through my art.
I often use words and I often hate words
Shalikah Walters is a writer from a working-class and multi-cultural community in Sheffield. She is currently working for Site Gallery supporting all Multi-Media Programmes, as a Western Jerwood Creative Bursaries Fellow. She has also been chosen to be a mentee on the I Like Networking 2021 programme
LI YILEI (b. China) is a conceptual artist working primarily with sound, performance and installation. As a gender non-conforming individual with Aspergers, the experience fluctuates between chaos and sometimes painful stillness, reflecting various conditions of being. Founder of NON DUAL collective / 無二行動, focusing on tracking early-career artists working within and beyond the discourse of the diasporic E/SEAsian identity. Li’s works are manifestations of an inquiry into tropes of phenomena, existence, power dynamics, and the politics of sound and listening.
Wei Zhou is a Chinese filmmaker and visual artist based in Glasgow, UK. Her works often reflect on the topics of multi-sensory and eroticism, her recent research and practice investigate the domination/submission dynamics between audio-visual, as well as other senses. Fluid presents an autobiographical story tracing the filmmaker’s very own personal growing-up experiences of love and desire as a Chinese born and raised queer woman. This work was selected for Scottish Queer International Film Festival 2017.