FRIEZE LIVE: NO REAL CLOSURE (2021)

Languid Hands by Adama Jalloh (2021)


As an extention of our Cubitt Fellowship, Languid Hands also curated the LIVE programme for Frieze London in 2021, exploring themes of transformation, embodiment and grief.

REBECCA BELLANTONI

Condition the roses, accept the vision. C.R.Y, 2021

Condition the roses, accept the vision. C.R.Y, is centred around questions of liminal space. Thinking through and with the possibilities of re/creation, the performance asks if the liminal space can become physical and what form that might take. What is possible within this space? Who and what can enter/join? Is the liminal space a communal one? What can be shared and is it possible to leave a liminal space with something ‘concrete’, foundational and workable?


Watch Condition the roses, accept the vision. C.R.Y (2021).

We are looking. We are searching. We are listening.

We know she will come, we know that she will arrive but when...

We thought we caught a glimpse of her in an archive somewhere.

We do not know.

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These are fragments of finding, records of being in and with the body, flash-fire encounters with ancestors. This is a seeking of more than what we have to hand.

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Using the ghostly, hypnotic and meditative capacities of reflective surfaces, Sodipo speculates on black trans desire and thirst as instinctual drives, gesturing towards and stuttering out - in song, and in movement, and in text - an embedded and embodied knowledge of a configuration of being that can now only be felt, has been lost to sensible knowing, existing only on the murky edges of consciousness; destroyed in the encounter with the West.


Watch my body reminds us of water iii (2021)

Even Myself Knows That Too (Journal Dub) is a reference to a line from the song ‘Bad to Worse’ released in 1978 by Burning Spear and is a continuation of Ashley Holmes’s current explorations into the language, sound, movement and foundations of Black musical tradition. An ode to his guiding voices, to ancestors, to the legacies of the Blues, of Reggae, Rocksteady and Dub through experiments in space and sound. The performance combines installation, moving image and DJing, navigating disparate but connected geographies across the Black Atlantic through musical encounters with expressions, or acknowledgements, of feelings of sorrow, aspiration, fear, hope, love and dread.

Watch Even Myself Knows That Too (Journal Dub) (2021)