Diasporas Now U.K. Tour 2023 - 2024
NN Contemporary Art
2 November, 2023
Diasporas Now’s debut UK tour begins in Northampton in partnership with NN Contemporary Art. Expect a night of conjuring alternative existences through ritual, lament and alter egos by artists: Buket Yenidogan & Zhao Jiajing, Sym Stellium, okcandice, BISHI, Jennifer Lauren Martin.
Performance Lineup
Welcome by Rieko Whitfield, Paola Estrella, and Lulu Wang
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
