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-Radiophrenia Festival (2019)

-Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020)

The Beast Audio Drama - 12 mins 54 secs

Esi Eshun: Writer, Director, Producer, Sound, Editor, Performer

Unfolding through a series of enigmatic tableaux, told through the artist’s poetry, polyvocal performances, field recordings and improvised score, The Beast takes the listener on a dreamlike journey to a place where true events and phenomena are transmuted into myth and fable, and where dark undercurrents linking The City of London, the West African coast, muck, gold and Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial classic, The Wretched of the Earth, coincide.

The Beast excerpt link https://vimeo.com/669252302

The Beast full length audio - 12 mins 54
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dxBBvhwn8xWl9DN9uhuKOoEIKoa8EVMv/view?usp=drivesdk

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About The Beast - Extract from Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Review, The Daily Star, Bangladesh, by Zahangir Alom

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About The Beast - Extract from Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Review, The Daily Star, Bangladesh, by Zahangir Alom

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https://www.thedailystar.net/in-focus/news/dhaka-art-summit-2020-seismic-movements-1865827?amp

"Rituals for Temporal Deprogramming", curated by the Otolith Group, features works by Ayo Akingbade, Hadel Assali, Taysir Batniji, Tony Cokes, Esi Eshun, Black Quantum Futurism, Mohammed Harb, Louis Henderson, Onyeka Igwe, Salman Nawati, Ana Pi, Morgan Quaintance, Alfred Santana, Rania Stephan, Sharif Waked and Rehana Zaman”

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The Beast - Notes on Narrative Sources  

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About The Beast - Notes on Narrative Sources

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About The Beast - Notes on Narrative Sources

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The Beast - Notes on Narrative Sources  2

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About The Beast - Plural Exercises in Speech - ICA, London

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About The Beast - Extract from talk - Plural Exercises in Speech Colloquium, ICA, London (2019)

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About The Beast - Extract from talk - Plural Exercises in Speech Colloquium, ICA, London (2019)

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About The Beast - Plural Exercises in Speech - ICA 3

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Colonial Riddley, Audio Essay, Esi Eshun  (2020)

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Colonial Riddley, Audio Essay, Esi Eshun  (2020)

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Colonial Riddley Audio Essay: 5 mins
Esi Eshun: Writer, Director, Sound, Editor, Performer

Audio contribution for Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit Symposium commemorating the 40th anniversary of the publication of Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban - University of the Arts, Canterbury/University of Kent.

Link to Audio work:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xVE9rGSx-As

Link to Symposium Blog - University of the Arts, Canterbury

https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/sumtymsbit/about-us/

“Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit was an online ‘sum poasyum’ incorporating a programme of talks, screenings and creative responses inspired by Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980). Set in post-apocalyptic East Kent and written in a futuristic Kentish dialect, the novel continues to exert a powerful influence over contemporary readers, writers and critics. Canterbury is at the heart of Riddley’s world – so where better to have hosted a virtual celebration of its legacy?”

Artists Talk - Esi Eshun and Fiona MacDonald/Feral Practice

SESSION THREE – 14.00 24 OCTOBER 2020

14.00 Feral Practice and Esi Eshun – conversation and Q&A (20 mins)

Artists Feral Practice and Esi Eshun discuss the film Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit and Esi Eshun’s audio piece Colonial Riddley. Addressing some of the ways in which the novel forecasts the hubris of the Anthropocene, they explore the degree to which power is located away from the domain of the human, and how the multiple failingst and erasures of Enlightenment and extractivist thinking assume deep relevance for today’s interwoven crises.

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Public Encounters: The Changing Face of Civic Art - Activism: The Power of Political Art (2021)

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Public Encounters: The Changing Face of Civic Art - Activism: The Power of Political Art (2021)

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Public lecture for Central St Martins/Art Academy of Latvia

https://www.lma.lv/en/actual-3/public-encounters-the-changing-face-of-civic-art-part-3

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4yTimEREypc&t=3954s

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https://vimeo.com/516286477/description
Password: Pigeons

The Unbecoming (2020) 4K Digital video, 28 mins, 24 secs

Esi Eshun: Writer, Director, Camera, Editor, Sound Composition and Design, Performer

Conceived prior to the pandemic, but primarily filmed in isolation on iPhone during the artist’s coronavirus shielding quarantine, The Unbecoming, casts a meditative spotlight on some lesser known aspects of Britain’s carceral, colonial and socio-engineering past, through the speculative tale of a woman held in an ambiguous state of confinement more than one hundred years ago. Set against the backdrop of the First World War and touching upon Europe’s colonial policies on both domestic and international fronts, the film employs unstable spatial and temporal narrative frames to pay lyrical testimony to some of the limits placed on bodily, psychological and political freedoms, amid considerations of what it might mean to be regarded as less than fully human. Drawing on extensive historical research, archival photographs, and a poeticised style of image making, the artist also turns the camera on her own body in part to acknowledge the physical and technical constraints of the film’s making, and in part to address continued entanglements between Britain’s eugenicist and imperialist past and today’s unsettled times.

Supported by Arts Council England.

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The Unbecoming Q&A. Interview and video, included as module in Subaltern Studies programme, Open University of Catalonia

Published Five Years website

(To read Q&A on website, scroll sideways and then downwards)

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INFINITY Minus Infinity - Film collaboration with The Otolith Group (2019)

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INFINITY Minus Infinity - Film collaboration with The Otolith Group (2019)

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INFINITY Minus Infinity - 56 mins, 51 secs

Director/Producer: The Otolith Group
Esi Eshun: - Concept, Sound, Research Development, Writer, Performer

https://vimeo.com/669195368/924c720415

Presented:
- Life Between Islands, Tate Britain (2022)
- Berlin Berlinale (2021)
- Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019)

“INFINITY minus Infinity brings together dance, performance, music, recital, and digital animation to compose a transhistorical zone in which the unpayable debts of racial capitalism cannot be separated from the ongoing crimes of the climate catastrophe. It enacts past distress, present duress, and future dread through the assembly of a chorus of trans-temporal deities whose utterances, expressions, gestures, and movements personify the compounded, accumulated, irreparable times and spaces of the hostile environment.

INFINITY minus Infinity draws on several inspirations: the modernist verse of the Jamaican poet Una Marson, philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, the black feminist poetics of the Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva, and the racial formation of geology theorised by British geographer Kathryn Yusoff amongst others.”

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Live-streamed Discussion - Infinity minus Infinity hosted by Lux Moving Image (2020)

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Live-streamed Discussion - Infinity minus Infinity hosted by Lux Moving Image (2020)

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Department of Xenogenesis: Hostile Environment: Environmental Hostility

https://m.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=684948372067472&_rdr

Discussion with Ed Halter and Otolith Group - Bard College, New York (2021)

https://www.bard.edu/inside/calendar/black-love-black-visions-black-revolution-2021-04-18

Film and Electronic Arts Program Presents

Black Love / Black Visions / Black Revolution

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Participant in The Black Radical Tradition panel, part of the Rights of Future Generations talks programme alongside the screening of Infinity minus Infinity

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Sharjah Architecture Triennial Talk (2019)

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Sharjah Architecture Triennial Talk (2019)

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Extract from Talk

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Microfascisms article - Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Issue #11, edited by Marc Herbst (2020)

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Microfascisms article - Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Issue #11, edited by Marc Herbst (2020)

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Short article on Microfascisms (see page 2) submitted as part of Five Years’ contribution to JOAAP’s Anti-Fascism Newsletter issue

http://www.joaap.org/issue11/newsletters/FiveYears_forWeb.pdf

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Panellist at JOAAP Publication launch at MayDay Rooms (2021)

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Panellist at JOAAP Publication launch at MayDay Rooms (2021)

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https://maydayrooms.org/event/let-a-thousand-a4-pages-bloom-the-newsletter-form-past-and-present/

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Discuss & Decolonise, Lecture and Workshop Event, The Exchange, Erith & Crafts Council (2021)

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Discuss & Decolonise, Lecture and Workshop Event, The Exchange, Erith & Crafts Council (2021)

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https://www.theexchangeerith.com/whats-on/discuss-and-decolonise

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Bad Ideas Collective video - Tallinn City Gallery, Estonia (2023)

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Bad Ideas Collective video - Tallinn City Gallery, Estonia (2023)

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Short extract from Bad Ideas #1

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X8_TkMsdDrnSiHY_-VW2Cn40J46OMvRc/view?usp=drivesdk

From Saturday, 12 November, exhibition Bad Ideas by Bad Ideas Collective will be open at Tallinn City Gallery. While searching for an answer to the questions what distinguishes a brilliant idea from a poor one and how big a role do different contexts play in contemporary art, the collective presents 17 short videos by individual artists and collaborators without direct authorial attribution.

The artworks of Bad Ideas are presented without direct authorial attribution, as a means of shifting audience engagement away from questions of production and ownership. The emphasis is on the candid disclosure of the play and processing of ideas – how they are evaluated and either used or abandoned in the creative process. Within this quasi-confessional framework a kind of collective formal freedom might emerge: a speculative post art-world space where the ghosts of discarded possibilities drift and intermingle, cut loose from the moorings of authorship and value. Do these artworks in fact exist in a parallel reality – a “bad” world where the ideas came to fruition through alternative thought processes?

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Postcolonial Tempest Article, The Exchange, Erith & Crafts Council (2021)

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Postcolonial Tempest Article, The Exchange, Erith & Crafts Council (2021)

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https://www.theexchangeerith.com/refroom/lo9lk60woyktxhf7qc0pwxbp5vwbi5

Edited extract from lecture

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Lissener - Audio Drama, Collaboration with Feral Practice, Estuary Festival (2021)

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Lissener - Audio Drama, Collaboration with Feral Practice, Estuary Festival (2021)

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https://www.estuaryfestival.com/event/detail/lissener.html

Fiona MacDonald: Director, Writer, Editor

Esi Eshun: Performer, Editorial Direction

“Feral Practice & Esi Eshun's Lissener is a darkly comic audio work responding to the ruined Oare Gunpowder Works, Oare Creek and Oare Marshes. Oare’s explosive past intertwines with diverse natural histories in this watery world, disturbing the expected hierarchies between species and states of being. The creaturely cast of characters includes Noctule bats, wading birds, a Bamboo Worm and a Southern Hawker dragonfly.

Words and stories are inserted into broader rhythms. If the concept ‘soundscape’ prioritizes the sounds that mammals hear, the term ‘vibroscape’ suggests an expanded world, in which we are just one kind of being with a pair of ears, in a world of differently-eared and non-eared, sensitive and vibratory, sensing and speaking beings. Alongside narrative, the artists use alternative field recording technologies such as hydrophones and contact microphones to access nonhuman kinds of vibrational experience.

Vibrant material meetings and exchanges occur at every level of our bodies and worlds but often go unregarded, or unknown. If we sensitize ourselves (as vegetal philosopher Michael Marder advises) to the fuzzy edges of our subjectivity in order to meet beings very different to ourselves, might it be in the ‘wilds’ of the imagination that we can better re-align with nonhuman nature?”

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Sum Tyms Bitin Sum Tyms Bit - Film Collaboration with Feral Practice - Folkestone Triennial (2020)

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Sum Tyms Bitin Sum Tyms Bit - Film Collaboration with Feral Practice - Folkestone Triennial (2020)

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Voice over contribution to film by Feral Practice/Fiona MacDonald

https://www.feralpractice.com/sum-tyms-bit/index.php

Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit draws resonance between themes of power, fragility and exploitation in Kent’s landscapes, and the forces at work in Russell Hoban’s cult 1980 novel Riddley Walker. In the post-apocalyptic world of the book, inhabitants of ‘Inland’ (East Kent) mythologise the fragments of a lost civilization destroyed by human ambition.

In 2020 we experienced profound insight into our own vulnerabilities, and the unpredictable consequences of our exploitative relationship with animals and the land. Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit, alive to the climate crisis, global disease vectors, species extinction and postcolonial extraction, explores how humans obliterate and control nonhuman worlds. It probes human sites of power in East Kent, including Faversham’s explosive past, Thanet Earth’s constant day, and the unfathomable nuclear futures of Dungeness. And in adjunct spaces to these behemoths, it finds wild creatures living circumscribed lives, often in isolation from their kind.

Esi Eshun: “The work plays with layers of awareness, where something not quite apprehended rubs up against more conscious evocations of place and meaning.”

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Antinomia - Performance Event, Iklectik, London (2022), curated by Brandon LaBelle and Lucia Farinati

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Antinomia - Performance Event, Iklectik, London (2022), curated by Brandon LaBelle and Lucia Farinati

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https://iklectikartlab.com/the-listening-academy-performances/

In Antinomia, multidisciplinary artist Esi Eshun presents a listening event combining live voice and sound works incorporating dramatised scenarios, poetic fragments, commentary and song, in an exploration of the recurring narratives Britain and its allies tell themselves about their past and present.

THE LISTENING ACADEMY is an independent research academy focusing on listening as a philosophical, artistic, social and somatic issue. This entails a relation to sonic, performative and ecological practices, sound studies research, and experimental pedagogy. The Academy offers a generative and nurturing framework for researchers and practitioners to engage in collaborative exchange and the sharing of knowledge, as well as workshopping new directions in sound studies and related practices.

THE LISTENING ACADEMY is part of THE LISTENING BIENNIAL, an international network and biennial exhibition
platform.

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Link to Antinomia performance - recorded by Iklectik in binaural mode. Recording of Antinomia starts at 73 minutes.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B_InoySba3nEzg3zO65ls_VIlQRFUa7c/view?usp=drivesdk

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Written 2020, performed during Antinomia event, 2022

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Image: Jonathan Ashley - Esi Eshun, Daniel L, Rachel Jacobs & Future Machine

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Contributing Artist on 30 year eco-art project, developing yearly rituals and processions to a changing roster of seven trees in Finsbury Park, witnessed by The Future Machine, an interactive, environmental data and memory capture artwork by Rachel Jacobs. Part of a longitudinal art and research project incorporating five locations across the UK, the project is supported by the University of Nottingham and Arts Council England.

https://www.whenthefuturecomes.net/london/

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Extract Seven Sisters Walks. Image and text: Esi Eshun

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Extracts of words written for performance during the Seven Sisters Tree Walks for the When the Future Comes project. Seven trees are to be visited each year for seven years, allowing long term relationships to grow between artist, trees, publics, landscapes, and organisations in Finsbury Park, within the context of explorations of indigenous and cross-cultural understandings of plant life, and of the multiple significations of the globally and historically resonant Seven Sisters myth.

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Performance with musicians, The Rainmakers, Finsbury Park (2022) : Image: Jonathan Ashley 

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When the Future Comes Residency at Furtherfield Commons, Furtherfield Gallery (2022-23)

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When the Future Comes Residency at Furtherfield Commons, Furtherfield Gallery (2022-23)

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Year long Residency (Nov 22- 23) at Furtherfield Commons/Furtherfield Gallery, Finsbury Park, London

https://www.whenthefuturecomes.net/residency/

Link to recording of performance with musicians,The Rainmakers, at the beginning of the residency. Mixing electronic music with African drums, acoustic instruments, and weather and voice recordings from the Future Machine, the spoken words and music attempt to evoke diverse, affectively charged, environmental and psychological atmospheres experienced as a result of changing climate conditions.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aPRu9qAhzNyAW-p-OvtknbpVVxoQAQuW/view?usp=drivesdk

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Refugia - Walking Art Curatorial Project - Five Years (2022)

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Refugia - Walking Art Curatorial Project - Five Years (2022)

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http://www.fiveyears.org.uk/archive2/pages/298/Refugia_Part3/298.html

Long term curatorial walking art project centred around the intersection of theory and practice

Refugia are isolated locations in which multiple, inter-dependent species flourish in the midst of a general hostile environment. Acting as sites of resurgence following ecological devastation, they enable eventual biological and cultural rejuvenation to occur, once plants, animals, humans and other species have dispersed from their places of refuge.

Developed over three iterations, Refugia aims to bring opportunities for Walking Art practitioners to explore ideas of place, time and refuge amid ecological and political disturbance.

Participants in Refugia Project, March - September 2022 :

Ilga Leimanis, Andra Kalnins, Nathania Hartley, Catherine Harrington,  Esi Eshun, Esther Planas, Bettina Fung

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Refugia Majuscule. Image and text: Esi Eshun

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Extract from contribution to work in progress e-book, edited and designed by Esi Eshun, documenting Refugia walks and related events.

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Catherine Harrington during her walk/installation at Hillside Park, Archway, on the site of a former Victorian workhouse. Image: Esi Eshun 

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Refugia Part 3 - Walking Art Curatorial Project at Five Years (2022)

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Refugia Part 3 - Walking Art Curatorial Project at Five Years (2022)

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Event presented during the third iteration of the Refugia Walking Art project comprising two days of walk related events and an exhibition at Five Years, Archway.

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Background image: Hannah Catherine Jones, courtesy of The Collective Makers

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The Memories of Water talk delivered as part of the Black in Full Colour Conference, organised by The Collective Makers, in collaboration with the Maritime Museum, London

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Maritime Museum Talk, Memories of Water 

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Extract from Maritime Museum Talk (2022)

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Extract from Maritime Museum Talk (2022)

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A Fever Dream - Extract from Five Years Antifascist Newsletter # 2 (2023)

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A Fever Dream - Extract from Five Years Antifascist Newsletter # 2 (2023)

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Writer of A Fever Dream essay for second Five Years Antifascist newsletter - not yet published - originally written in 2020

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Finding Common Ground Walk - London Festival of Architecture (2023)

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Finding Common Ground Walk - London Festival of Architecture (2023)

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Join us for a guided walk in Finsbury Park as we explore landmark trees, ponds and green spaces to learn about the uniqueness and diversity of this place dubbed "The People's Park". While visiting community gardens and park facilities, we will experience how diverse visitor activities coexist, at times uneasily, alongside the natural landscape of this popular park. Stories about the park’s human / nonhuman inhabitation, its distinctions between the cultivated and the “wild” species and the complexity of living together in common will be introduced by the walk’s guides, to offer participants of all ages a deep appreciation of the “living history” of Finsbury Park.

https://2023.londonfestivalofarchitecture.org/event/finding-common-ground-touring-finsbury-park

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Image: Marc Hulson, Esi Eshun video - 5 mins

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Bad Ideas Collective, Tallin City Gallery, Estonia (2023)

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Bad Ideas Collective, Tallin City Gallery, Estonia (2023)

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Link to review of anonymised Bad Ideas Collective exhibition, Tallin Art Hall, Estonia (2023).

Published: Berlin Art Link
Text: Dagmara Genda

https://www.berlinartlink.com/2023/02/07/bad-ideas-collective-tallinn-art-hall-exhibition-review/

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Vestibule Exhibition , Lethaby Gallery (2023)

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Vestibule Exhibition , Lethaby Gallery (2023)

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Contributor to Research Project: Prisoners of Love: Affect, containment and alternative futures

Connecting UK museum collection items with home and diasporic communities through virtual visits and art practices. A conversation about Prisoners of Love, Concepts Have Teeth and Mootookakio'ssin research projects, with work and thoughts from students who have been part of the projects. Art practices embedded in a web of relations between de/colonial histories, technologies and digital media.”

Event at Vestibule Gallery: Disruptions: power dynamics of aquisition

Anjalie Dalal Clayton, Sara David, Esi Eshun, Lennon Mhishi, Louisa Minkin, Raksha Patel, Judy Willcocks, Siyan Zhang

This conversation will explore the power dynamics of acquisition in museums and galleries. From researching existing collections, to surface bias, to working with acquisition selection panels, commissioning new work and working for restitution and reparation. What is a collection? What does it mean to have your work accessioned? We will reflect on the power dynamics of selecting student work for the UAL collection and how they have been overturned, as well as situating this work of disruption within its broader, urgent and ongoing political context.

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OST Exhibition - OPENing, London (2023) ,  OST zine (2023)

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OST Exhibition - OPENing, London (2023) ,  OST zine (2023)

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Co-curator of OST exhibition. Held in a disused bank in the City of London, the exhibition brought together creative responses to archival collections at Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, The Archeology Department of the University of Ghana, and Kew Gardens, London, and was an output of Prisoners of Love, part of the transnational AHRC funded Imaganing Futures project.

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OST zine

OST exhibition booklet and online zine. Contains essay, The Quiet Object, written in response to a visit to Pitt Rivers Museum archival collections. See pages 4-5 of booklet.

https://figshare.arts.ac.uk/articles/online_resource/_b_OST_zine_b_/25975615?file=46835932

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Mootookakio’ssin: Creating in Spacetime, Hess Gallery, University of Lethbridge, Alberta, (2023)Canada

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Mootookakio’ssin: Creating in Spacetime, Hess Gallery, University of Lethbridge, Alberta, (2023)Canada

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Contributor to exhibition organised as part of AHRC funded Imagining Futures Project

https://artgallery.uleth.ca/mootookakiossin-creating-in-spacetime-hess-gallery-november-6-december-16-2023/

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Mootookakio’ssin: Creating in Spacetime | Hess Gallery | November 6 – December 16, 2023 – University of Lethbridge Art Gallery

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Organized by Migueltzinta Solis, Josephine Mills, & Louisa Minkin

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Politics of the Voice - Courtisane Festival, Ghent, Belgium (2024)

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Politics of the Voice - Courtisane Festival, Ghent, Belgium (2024)

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Presenter and Moderator at Politics of the Voice performance and conversation events during Courtisane Festival, curated by Elaine Mitchener

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Politics of the Voice - Courtisane Festival, Ghent (2024)

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Politics of the Voice - Courtisane Festival, Ghent (2024)

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Presenter and moderator of conversations on the politics of the voice with contemporary musicians and poets, Lore Lixenberg, Audrey Chen, Jay Bernard, Nha Thuyen and Elaine Mitchener

See Introduction and post-performance conversation at the end of

Politics of the Voice: Session 1- The Politics of Vocal Music, Courtisane Festival -

https://vimeo.com/1012024532

Introduction and post-performance conversation

Politics of the Voice: Session 2 - The Politics of Voice Poetry

https://vimeo.com/1014458710

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Still from Interlochia, directed by Esi Eshun

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Interlochia - Video contribution to Agents of Deterioration exhibition, Lethaby Gallery (2024)

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Interlochia - Video contribution to Agents of Deterioration exhibition, Lethaby Gallery (2024)

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Video Contribution to Agents of Deterioration, final phase of Prisoners of Love exhibition

INTERLOCHIA PART 1

Interlochia is a fantastical tale woven around the figure of a mythical Plague Doctor. Finding himself unemployed after the end of the Great Plague of 1665, he decides to travel to Africa and the Americas in search of new plant remedies. In his quest, he is inspired by the work of real life naturalist, astronomer, illustrator and cartographer, Georg Marcgraf or Marcgrave, whose influential compendium, Natural History of Brazil, (1648) details the flora and fauna of the Pernambuco region of Brazil.

Pernambuco was the centre of a short lived Dutch colony in Brazil, whose Governor General, Count Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen sought to outline and  capture in art and science all natural life there. The region had a notably high concentration of enslaved Africans, and from 1605-94, was the site of the world’s largest maroon settlement, the Quilombo of Palmares, inhabited primarily by escaped Africans, but also by smaller numbers of indigenous peoples and marginalised Portuguese settlers.

Although an invented word, Interlochia bears comparison with the name Interlochen, meaning between lakes, a tiny settlement in Michigan which was once home to members of the Odawa people. The project will be developed further to explore some of these themes in more detail.

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Our Stories Are Wild exhibition - Derby Cathedral (2024)

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Our Stories Are Wild exhibition - Derby Cathedral (2024)

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Contributor to immersive soundscape for Our Stories Are Wild exhibition as part of the When the Future Comes Collective

The University of Derby present Our Stories Are Wild, an exhibition which brings together artists and researchers who focus on the human-nature relationship. Many of the artworks and films reveal an emotional and spiritual connection with our environment and explore themes of care, hope and responsibility. Curated by Caroline Locke, Associate Professor of Arts, the exhibition includes over 25 artists and collaborators, many from Derbyshire and the East Midlands. The launch and celebration will take place on Monday 24 June from 18:30 to 20:30, coinciding with the University of Derby’s Nature Connections Conference 2024 ( see details here https://www.derby.ac.uk/events/latest-events/nature-connections-conference-2024/)

The exhibition is free to attend and can be found within the Cathedral building. Please be mindful of opening and service times, which can be found on our Visit page – Visit | Derby Cathedral

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The University of Derby present Our Stories Are Wild, anexhibition which brings together artists and researchers who focus on the human-nature relationship. Many of the artworks and films reveal an emotional and spiritual connection with our environment and explore themes of care, hope and responsibility. Curated by Caroline Locke, Associate Professor of Arts, the exhibition includes over 25 artists and collaborators, many from Derbyshire and the East Midlands. The launch and celebration will take place on Monday 24 June from 18:30 to 20:30, coinciding with the University of Derby's Nature Connections Conference 2024 ( see details here https://www.derby.ac.uk/events/latest-events/nature-connections-conference-2024/)

The exhibition is free to attend and can be found within the Cathedral building. Please be mindful of opening and service times, which can be found on our Visit page - Visit | Derby Cathedral

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Tuesday 08:30 - 18:30
Wednesday 08:30 - 18:00
Thursday 08:30 - 18:30
Friday 08:30 - 17:00
Saturday 09:00 - 17:00

Registered Charity Number: 1207768.

Please check the Visit page for up to date information.

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'Our Stories Are Wild' art exhibition | Derby Cathedral

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Come and see the 'Our Stories Are Wild' art exhibition, Curated by Caroline Locke, Associate Professor of Arts, University of Derby. Featuring over 22 artists and collaborators, many from Derbyshire and the East Midlands, the pieces of art reveal an emotional and spiritual connection with our environment and explore themes of care, hope and responsibility.

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Prisoners of Love Report - Anthropology and Education Conference - Royal Anthropological Institute (2024)

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Prisoners of Love Report - Anthropology and Education Conference - Royal Anthropological Institute (2024)

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Co-writer and presenter of paper in Objects as Curricula sessions - Royal Anthropological Institute

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Agents of Deterioration Booklet - Imagining Futures Repository

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Agents of Deterioration Booklet - Imagining Futures Repository

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Co-editor with Louisa Minkin, of Agents of Deterioration Booklet, published online as part of AHRC funded Imagining Futures Repository. Includes edited transcript of conversation between Esi Eshun and Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of Inhuman Geography, Queen Mary’s, University of London.

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Women of the Whole World: A Murmuration of Resolutions and Appeals - Performance Event curated by The Otolith Group, Greengrassi Gallery, London (2024)

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Women of the Whole World: A Murmuration of Resolutions and Appeals - Performance Event curated by The Otolith Group, Greengrassi Gallery, London (2024)

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Overview by The Otolith Group, Department of Xenogenesis

For Women of the Whole World: A Murmuration of Resolutions and Appeals, The Otolith Group invites musicians, non-musicians and noisicians to participate in an event hosted by the free-jazz and improvising vocalist, dancer, and performer, Maggie Nicols.

In the company of sound artists and experimental musicians such as Faradena Afifi, Steve Beresford, Ansuman Biswas, Esi Eshun, Lore Lixenburg and noisicians from the Noisy Peoples Orchestra, Women of the Whole World: A Murmuration of Resolutions and Appeals invites musicians and non-musicians, vocalists, poets, writers, performance artists, dancers and visual artists to participate in an experiment with improvisation. We ask everyone to bring an instrument or a sound making object, their voice, or to simply join in by listening in to the collective sounding of appeals and resolutions and the resounding of declarations and demands.

Think of Women of the Whole World: A Murmuration of Resolutions and Appeals as an invitation, hosted under the umbrella of the Department of Xenogenesis or DXG, to practice what Maggie Nicols calls ‘social virtuosity’. An invitation that opens the force of sound at a time, now, and a place, here, characterised by the gravity of speech, the threat of silence, the grief of vocality and the rage of assertion.

Included in the event will be a process of recitation, revisiting and reinterpreting passages from the resolutions and appeals printed and distributed by the WIDF between its founding Congress in Paris in November 1945, the Conference of the Women of Asia in Beijing in December 1949 and the World Congress of Women in Moscow in June 1963.

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The Vanishment still: Esi Eshun/Jonathan Ashley

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The Vanishment - 4K Digital Video (2024) - Raise the Roof: Building for Change Exhibition, RIBA, London

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The Vanishment - 4K Digital Video (2024) - Raise the Roof: Building for Change Exhibition, RIBA, London

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The Vanishment 4K Digital Video - 16 mins, 38 secs (2024)

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/941633461/847c29c975

Commissioned by RIBA, The Royal Institute of British Architects, Esi Eshun's The Vanishment responds to an invitation, in the organisation’s 90th year, to reconsider the imperialist architectures of its London headquarters. Focusing on a monumental canvas, The Henry Jarvis Mural, created to adorn a movable, so called vanishing wall, the film sets out to draw attention to some of the darker narratives intertwined within its making. Choreographing photographic archives with a meditative voiceover, it aims to provide an insight into the work’s place within wider sociopolitical and ecological currents, both in its day, and by extension, in the present moment.

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About The Vanishment - Raise the Roof:  Building For Change, RIBA, London (2024)

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About The Vanishment - Raise the Roof:  Building For Change, RIBA, London (2024)

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RIBA overview:

https://www.architecture.com/explore-architecture/exhibitions/Raise-the-Roof

Our latest exhibition explores the narratives and attitudes embedded within the fabric of RIBA’s headquarters at 66 Portland Place, London, unpacking themes such as gender, race and imperialism through a series of new and exciting creative works.

Opened in 1934, when the modern architectural profession was being forged, RIBA’s Grade II* listed home can tell us a lot about the values and beliefs of architects in that period, and of wider society.

In this exhibition, a variety of new artistic interventions interrogate and respond to the complex narratives within specific interior features of 66 Portland Place – the Jarvis Mural and Florence Hall Dominion Screen. You’re invited to help uncover the building’s complicated history and share your hopes for the future of architecture and the profession.

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The Vanishment talk - Esi Eshun - June 2024

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The Vanishment  - Pre-Screening  Talk, RIBA, London (2024)

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The Vanishment  - Pre-Screening  Talk, RIBA, London (2024)

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Reframing Colonial Legacies: a sonic journey from Johannesburg to London

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Reframing Colonial Legacies: a sonic journey from Johannesburg to London

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Artists Conversation- Reframing Colonial Legacies: a sonic journey from Johannesburg to London

Thu 04 July 2024

12:30 -19:30

RIBA

Commissioned in response to our latest exhibition Raise the Roof: Building for Change it will explore themes such imperialism, race, gender and architecture through sound and discussion.

Following the performance, Sibonelo Gumede and Nombuso Mathibela will be joined by the Raise the Roof artists to discuss current architectural aesthetic practice and education.

You’ll be invited to take part in the discussion and explore the complex histories of colonial architecture including those found within our historic headquarters 66 Portland Place.

https://www.architecture.com/whats-on/reframing-colonial-legacies-a-sonic-journey-from-johannesburg-to-london

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Image - Harry Ebenezer Mensah, Cape Coast, Ghana (2024)

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Decolonising Architecture: Reimagining spaces and histories - RIBA, London (2024) 

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Decolonising Architecture: Reimagining spaces and histories - RIBA, London (2024) 

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Talk delivered at Decolonising Architecture Symposium.

How can we change architectural practice to create a more inclusive and equitable future? Designers, architects, historians and creative practitioners come together to debate and shape new ideas to transform urban planning, architecture and the built environment for an afternoon symposium.

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Image: Harry Ebenezer Mensah, Cape Coast, Ghana (2024)

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Decolonising Architecture Symposium - RIBA (2024)

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Decolonising Architecture Symposium - RIBA (2024)

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Abstract for talk - Architectures of Containment and Liberation

In this talk, I aim to unpack the main threads touched upon within the film, The Vanishment, situating the Jarvis mural’s imperialist ideologies within wider socio-political and eeconomic contexts of the time, revealing, in the process, the extremist nature of the thinking and practices embedded within it.

I will try to counter the vision of settler colonial relations represented within it by offering perspectives into wider colonial contexts, using elements of my personal family history in Ghana/the Gold Coast, to address aspects of architectural networks in the region.

I will focus on Ghanian architecture built in coastal areas from around 1870-1930, showing how the cosmopolitan nature of the large houses built to accommodate extended families, derived from the realities of intercultural exchange at the time. The buildings, borrowing from both European and vernacular styles, and utilising local resources and techniques such as the rammed earth construction method, serve to destabilise continuing assumptions around the nature of power relations in the region, while also paving the way for the later blending and hybridisation of styles/techniques from the 1940s onwards.

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Deep Time Festival - Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2024)

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Deep Time Festival - Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2024)

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https://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/deep-time/

Writer and moderator throughout four day experimental music festival based around a speculative meeting between Jean Michel Basquiat and John Cage on the fortieth anniversary of a dual exhibition at the Fruitmarket

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Deep Time Basquiat & Cage 8424 - Fruitmarket

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A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh

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The Art of Flying Backwards Part 1 Script 

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The Art of Flying Backwards Part 1 - Performance event - The Good Rice Project Space, London (2025)

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The Art of Flying Backwards Part 1 - Performance event - The Good Rice Project Space, London (2025)

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Feel the Sound Exhibition Catalogue - Barbican Centre, London (2024)

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Feel the Sound Exhibition Catalogue - Barbican Centre, London (2024)

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Extract from On Listening and Voice: Esi Eshun in conversation with Nina Eidsheim for Feel the Sound exhibition catalogue at Barbican Centre (2024).

This richly illustrated catalogue accompanies Feel the Sound, a landmark exhibition at the Barbican. Bringing together art, science, and sonic innovation, the publication explores how sound shapes our emotional, physical, and social worlds.

Edited by Taous Dahmani and designed by Other Office, the catalogue draws inspiration from the graphic energy and editorial vibrancy of iconic music magazines. Blending scholarly insight with creative experimentation, it presents a dynamic mix of essays, Q&As, poetry, comics, conversations, protocols, scores, and behind-the-scenes material.

Feel the Sound is both a critical resource and a sensory experience—an invitation to tune in, turn up, and listen more closely to the world around us.