ACT III: A Hole in the Air
ACT IV: Stone Telling
curated by A- - -Z
Camden Art Centre, 15 & 16 November 2025
With Ain Bailey, Gisou Golshani, Utopian_realism, Work (Huw Thomas & guests), Josèfa Ntjam, Tarek Lakhrissi, Harold Offeh (performance), Chooc Ly Tan & Mohammed Rowe (Live Set), Su Hui Yu (Screening), Shamica Ruddock (Live Set)
Photography by Anna-Lena Krause
Featuring performances by Ain Bailey, Gisou Golshani, utopian_realism, Huw Thomas & guests and films by Josefa Ntjam and Tarek Lakhrissi.
This series is the development of a recent research on the affect of visual and sound in narrative. The first iteration of Always Coming Home took place at Iklectik 2023 and carried on at Matt’s Gallery in 2024, as a starting point for ambient sensorial experimentation, a threshold for furthering the ideas of immersion, speculative world and conscious listening.
Each chapter from this on-going investigation aims at introducing a live performance, a moving image and a live musical set.
Thinking of change and flux as part of speculative futures and world building as ways of expressing current socio-political issues and expanding from there to potential other paths.
In line with this proposition, language, and other forms of expression, from the bodily to sound and the non-descriptive, are given a platform to create new ways of thinking and working together: the explorations and considerations of embodied practices as political disruptions.
A reference/inspiration is the work by Pauline Oliveros with the Deep Listening method aspiring to explore expanded consciousness – “Acoustic space is where time and space merge as they are articulated by sound.”
The aim of these projects is to build a network and community of artists that have not yet performed together and to introduce to an audience a set of practices – ranging from sound, soundscapes to visuals immersions as well as acting as a ‘wakening’ agents.
A---Z aims to impose a collaborative, inclusive and critical practice/praxis – this demands a responsibility to decolonise programmes, build on positivity towards/and inclusivity in terms of gender and race discourses, and demonstrate openness, intersectional, responsive and critical juxtaposition methods.
The title is an homage to the 1985 science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, where the reader follows the Kesh people, a cultural group who live in the distant future long after modern society has collapsed.
These events are funded by an Art Council Project Grant and a Research Grant from the Royal College of Art.
1. Pauline Oliveras, Deep Listening, A Composer’s Sound Practice, iUniverse inc., 2005
2. Rose Bandt, Hearing Australian Identity : Sites as acoustic spaces, an audible polyphony, 2020 https://walklistencreate.org/walkingpiece/hearing-australian-identity-sites-as-acoustic-spaces-an-audible-polyphony/