Diasporas Now UK Tour, 2023-2024. Art and design by Josh Woolford.

On Thursday 2nd November, NNCA will be hosting the first showcase of a UK tour by performance art platform Diasporas Now. Join us for a night of conjuring up alternative existences through ritual, lament, and alter egos!

Diasporas Now is a platform for expanded performance by the global majority, programming curated events that bridge workshops, panel discussions, museum lates, and nightlife. The Diasporas Now community celebrates cross-diasporic solidarity and champions artists of colour.

The tour, which spans NN Contemporary Art in Northampton, Humber Street Gallery in Hull, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, is supported by the Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant.

The workshop will be held at NN Contemporary Art’s temporary Project Space which is Unit 9 within the Vulcan Works complex, accessed from the Fetter Street entrance of Vulcan Works.

For further information and registration details, see the Eventbrite link below.

 

Lineup

:: Rieko Whitfield, Paola Estrella, and Lulu Wang aka Diasporas Now

:: Buket Yenidogan & Zhao Jiajing 

:: Sym Stellium 

:: okcandice 

:: BISHI 

:: Jennifer Lauren Martin 

:: 8.30pm til late – DJ Winggold DJ Set

About the artists

:: Buket Yenidogan & Zhao Jiajing 

Buket Yenidogan is an experimental multi-media artist, curator and academician who is exploring the posthuman kinship through art and technology. Zhao Jiajing is a sonic world architect, chaos designer, and cross-disciplinary artist working across spatial sound design, composition, installation, and new media.

Their multi-sensory performance “Summoning” is a sonic Neo-Shaman ritual set in a world where the ocean symbolises boundless possibilities, animating new forms from the depths of the ocean through sound improvisation, spoken word, and creative technologies.

:: Sym Stellium

Sym Stellium is a movement artist, performer and ritual maker exploring connection and communication around ritual with the body, and ancestral / psycho-somatic roots to physical pain.
“The Exhaustion of the Exorcised” is a performance moving through illness, penance, and healing within the Caribbean lineage – and possibilities of liberation from the inside out.

:: okcandice 

okcandice is a multidisciplinary artist-curator, writer, archivist and musician between Birmingham and Berlin.
For their forthcoming “Offering V7,” okcandice will ask participants to consider collective voices/utterances as an innate, primary response to grief and resistance.

:: BISHI 

BISHI is an artist, composer and producer born in London of Bengali heritage. Known for her trademark electric sitar and four-octave vocal range, her music focuses on subjects such as dual identities, anti-racism, feminine mythologies, and queer bodies.

BISHI will perform a soundtrack she composed and produced for a VR immersive video game installation “Maya, Birth of a Superhero” following Maya, an ordinary 21st-century girl, as she transforms into a uniquely female superhero and whose powers derive from menstruation. It is an odyssey of womanhood and femininity, referencing ancient symbols of spiritual and feminine power, drawing together the real and the imaginary to trace possible paths to resilience and justice.

:: Jennifer Lauren Martin 

Jennifer Lauren Martin is an artist filmmaker based in London. Martin’s practice spans fine art, film and writing that focuses on belonging. Martin’s multichannel sound performance embodies a central character “Aida,” in a game of performativity that mercilessly elides the distinctions between her desires and her identity.

DJ Winggold DJ Set

DJ Winggold is one of the key minds behind Unbound Events, a London-based events platform using underground music as a vehicle to elevate minorities and raise awareness of social issues. 
Drawing from the inherent sense of pain, rage, otherness, beauty and elation in the minority experience, DJ Winggold will be debuting a hybrid rap/DJ set, building a narrative interrogating the experience of what it’s like to be a black man in today’s society. Comprising sounds made solely by black and PoC artists from around the globe, the performance will be a visceral and confrontational soundscape, ultimately giving way to a deep sense of collective catharsis.