CURATORS’ SERIES #8 ALL OF US HAVE A

SENSE OF RHYTHM05.06.2015 – 01.08.2015

INTRODUCTIONIt is a great pleasure to welcome eighth guest curator Christine Eyene and her ambitious and original exhibition All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm to DRAF. This is, to my knowledge, the first exploration of the lineage of African rhythmic sources in modernist and contemporary practices, thanks to Eyene’s scholarship and personal dedication in its research.

The exhibition encompasses sculpture, dance, poetry, video, performance, sound and music. It traces the cadences of modern masters (John Cage, Langston Hughes), popular subcultures (Northern Soul, drum’n’bass) and a contemporary generation of London African diaspora artists (Larry Achiampong, Evan Ifekoya). We look forward to welcoming visitors to this exciting show and concurrent programme of talks and live performances.

DRAF is a factory for new prototypes to present and engage with art, and since 2009 exhibitions by international independent curators have introduced new forms to the space and our London audience. We have been particularly proud to present with them works of art from different continents, generations, practices and ideologies, many of which had never been previously displayed in the UK. The depth of their research, their individual curatorial sensibilities and the broad networks of artists and collaborators they have involved have made an invaluable contribution to our programme.

Our guests have brought much to the household, and we have both enjoyed and learned from these collaborations. Our thanks to previous Curators’ Series participants, all of whom remain part of the family.

We continue to be grateful to Arts Council England who have supported the Series since the beginning, and whose endorsement means a great deal. Thanks also to the many cultural funds who have supported elements of these exhibitions, including on this occasion The African Arts Trust.

A range of diverse and fascinating works constitute in this show, and we thank all the artists for their trust and commitment in bringing them to DRAF. The team at DRAF have, once again, produced this exhibition with dedication, and my personal thanks to Sandra Pusterhofer and Benedict Goodwin.

Finally, and most of all, we would like to thank Christine Eyene for her extraordinary knowledge and vision in curating this exhibition.

Vincent Honoré, Director & Chief Curator, DRAF

THE BEAT THAT’S HAUNTED US EVER SINCEOne day, Lorna – a friend of my elder sister’s, a South African teacher, journalist and anti-apartheid activist exiled in London – took us to visit an old man. It was somewhere near Saint-Michel, Saint-Germain, in Paris. His flat looked like an abandoned place, with cardboard covering broken windows and pieces of paper scattered everywhere. We were told he was a painter.

I never understood why Lorna took us to that place and I was quick to forget about the old man until he reappeared in our lives some time later. By then he had become Oncle Gerard, a mark of respect shown to elders in the Cameroonian and, generally speaking, African community. We would visit him at his retirement home in Nogent-sur-Marne; other times, my sister would bring him home for friends and family gatherings. Although I cannot recall any meaningful conversation with him, I clearly remember him enjoying watching our dances. All sorts of dances, to a variety of genres of black music, the most spectacular of which was the dance we performed to a music identified with Cameroon’s Beti people: Bikutsi.

Bikutsi, meaning “beat the earth” or “smash the ground” in the Ewondo language, is a fast pace 6/8 or 9/8 rhythm traditionally played with balafons (African xylophones). The dance involves keeping up the rhythm in an energetic back-and-forth movement of chest and hips – a movement subsequently popularised in urban dance such as hip hop. When one person dances, or two together, exhortations from the surrounding crowd include one to shake, or more precisely to break, the hips (ateg ankuk). We might not have had a good command of Ewondo, but as children from the Cameroonian community within the African diaspora, knowing how to dance Bikutsi was a way to claim our cultural identity. It was almost a rite of passage that legitimised a cultural belonging validated by the elders.

The Bikutsi genre is said to have appeared in the 1940s and was mainly the preserve of women, who used it as a medium to express themselves from a female perspective. It gained a new lease of life in the early 1980s with the electric keyboard and guitar adding to, or replacing, the balafons. Brought up by our mother, who under the stage name Sellsa contributed to the revival of the genre, our encounter with Oncle Gerard happened in the same decade that we were intensely exposed to this music.

I don’t think I ever saw Oncle Gerard dance. He had been knocked over by a car some time earlier. So he usually sat down and looked with fascinated eyes. He said things in English that I did not always understand. I remember once asking my sister for a translation: she said that watching us dance reminded him of home…

Later came some women […] all dancing to the rhythm of drummers1

Gerard Sekoto (1913-1993) left his native South Africa in 1947, a year before the implementation of what Jacques Derrida called “racism’s last word”.2 Although he had enjoyed some form of acknowledgement in a racially divided society, it was only toward the end of the apartheid regime, and the end of his life, that his art gained national and international recognition. He is now regarded as a one of the pioneers of African modern painting.

In the Paris-based black diaspora of the late 1940s, it comes as no surprise that Sekoto – who also played the piano in Saint-Germain jazz clubs – interacted with Négritude and Présence Africaine. Négritude was a literary and ideological movement developed in 1930s Paris by poets and political figures Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor. One of its disseminating outlets was Présence Africaine, a journal and publishing house both founded by Alioune Diop in 1947 and 1949 respectively. The movement and associated publications were instrumental in propogating a Francophone anti-colonial discourse, and highly influential in the decolonisation process of the 1950s–60s.

Although Sekoto never explicitly positioned himself as an advocate of Négritude, he was certainly responsive to its philosophy. He contributed writing to the journal and participated in the Society of African Culture’s first and second Conferences of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris (1956) and Rome (1959). He also took part in the first International Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar (1966), the only time he ever returned to Africa. Sekoto’s extended stay in Senegal echoed his own recommendation for Africans and members of the diaspora to return “now and then to Africa to draw their inspiration from spiritual sources which have not been influenced by Western culture”.3 He stayed in the West African country for a year and upon his return to Paris, his painterly touch had noticeably changed. He had developed a style of “facet-like” planes, to quote South African curator Lesley Spiro4; rhythmic strokes of paint conveying the impression of colourful rays, or light beams, cutting through the picture plane. In aesthetic terms, Sekoto’s post-Senegal compositions resonated with Senghor’s idea of rhythm as being at the centre of Africa’s system of thought and experience, influencing the continent’s and diaspora’s cultural productions.

1 Gerard Sekoto’s account of his time in Senegal in Barbara Lindop, Gerard Sekoto. Randburg: Dictum, 1988, p. 39.2 Jacques Derrida, ‘Racism’s Last Word’, in Art Against Apartheid, 1983, pp. 11-35.3 Gerard Sekoto, ‘Responsibility and Solidarity in African Culture’ in Chabani Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto. ‘I am an African’. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004, p. 223..4 Lesley Spiro, Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1989, p. 58.

Rhythmic attitude: may we remember the word5

In the year Léopold S. Senghor (1906-2001) published his seminal essay ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’ (‘What the black man brings’), the Western world embarked on the dark chapter of the Second World War. For Senghor, Africa’s contribution to the forging of a new world is not to be valued by the number of African troops joining the ranks of Europe’s, but rather through singular works by black writers and artists. However this essay, he writes, is not about that: it is about “all the virtual presences that the study of the Negro allows one to foresee”.6 Senghor focuses on African culture, the fertile elements of the “negro style” and, more precisely in the visual arts, sculpture which he sees as Africa’s most typical art form. He highlights the importance of the human figure in African sculpture and notes that, within anthropomorphic statues, the masks are predominant.

On classical African aesthetics, Senghor writes:

This ordinating force that makes the Negro style is the rhythm. It is the most sensitive thing and the least material. It is the vital element par excellence. It is the primary condition and the sign of art, like breathing in life; a breath that speeds up or slows down, becomes irregular or spasmodic according to the being’s tension, the degree and quality of emotion. Such is the rhythm primitively, in its pureness, as it stands in the masterpieces of Negro art, particularly sculpture. It is made up of a theme — sculptural form — opposed to a correlated theme, like inhaling and exhaling, and again. It is not a symmetry that engenders monotony; the rhythm is alive, it is free. For retake is not repeating, nor repetition. The theme is taken again at another place, another plane, in another combination, in a variation; and it gives another intonation, another timbre, another accent. And the overall effect is intensified, not without nuances. So does rhythm act, on what is least intellectual in us, despotically, to make us penetrate into the spirituality of the object; and this manner of abandonment that is ours is itself rhythmic. 7

Senghor’s rhetorical approach to rhythm in sculpture, culminating to what reads like the abandon of one’s body, if not one’s soul, is not far from the forms and effects of rhythmic occurrence found in African music and dance. He goes on to write that like sculpture, music cannot be separated from other African cultural aspects, such as dance and ritual songs. Although this inextricable relationship may be accepted across various specialist fields ranging from ethnography and

5 Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’ in Liberté 1: Négritude et humanisme. Paris: Seuil, 1964, p. 24. 6 Ibid., p. 22.7 Ibid., p.35.

anthropology to history of art and performing arts, in the West the presentation and experience of African sculpture or masks remains fraught with the issues raised by museum-type displays that disconnect and isolate the receptacles – be they objects or the body – that mediate, reverberate and reciprocate the rhythmic impulse.

Elders in Burkina Faso’s Yatenga region appraise the aesthetic quality (or beauty) of Mossi masks using terms referring to how well they dance8, a telling response. Likewise, in 2000 Paris-based Ivorian dancer and researcher Alphone Thiérou introduced a new discourse on African sculpture when he notably focused on the bent legs or diagonal bases of sculptures – such as the lozenge characterising Kota reliquaries (Gabon) – which he associated with the position of the legs in primary African dance movements (dooplé).9 This angle of reading had hardly, if ever, previously been considered by Western specialists.

British-Nigerian artist Sokari Douglas Camp’s kinetic sculptures of Kalabari Masquerades (1995) exemplify this desire to create forms of displays that reconcile African masks, movement or dance, and sound.

Black body in movement and accompanying sound

Africa’s virtual presence and the fertile elements that compose it appear well beyond the continent’s own cultural field in the early modernist period. One might not agree with Senghor when he says of black people that, “instinctively, they dance their music, they dance their life”10 _ an assertion which perpetuates a well-known stereotype. However one would not dispute that the legacy of African music has lived on in “Westernised” and “Americanised” black cultures. The example of our diaspora experience dancing Bikutsi in 1980s Paris at the start of this essay is a point in case.11

Senghor pursues his argument in his 1939 text by addressing Africa’s contribution to music in “modal” terms, in other words, in terms of form or structure. He cites Sierra Leonean composer and music scholar Nicholas G. J. Ballanta (1893-1962), who was himself quoted by Alain Locke (1885-1954).

Alain Locke, known as the Dean of the Harlem Renaissance, is important to

8 This element was pointed out by François Larini in his unpublished research entitled Masques, institutions et identités au Yatenga (Burkina Faso). Aix-en-Provence: Université Aix –Marseille 1, 2000.9 ‘De la danse à la sculpture: un autre regard sur l’esthétique africaine’. Paris: Musée de l’Homme, 2000.10 Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’, op. cit., p. 36.11 It needs to be reasserted here that the knowledge of Bikutsi dance is not instinctive but the result of exposure to this music.

reference in relation to Négritude. The Harlem Renaissance was a black cultural, literary and intellectual movement in New York in the 1920s. In a 1987 lecture given in Miami, Aimé Césaire acknowledged Negritude’s debt to this movement: “It is here, in the United States, among you, that Négritude was born. The first négritude was the American Négritude”.12

As far back as the 1930s, Senghor observes how Afro-Americans have remained close to African sources in musical interpretation.13 The same could be suggested of dance.

In the decades following the Harlem Renaissance, pioneers of “black dance” – including Hemsley Winfrey, Edna Guy, Kathrine Dunham, and Asadata Dafora – had fought to combat racial prejudice and find a space for African-American and African dancers beyond the traditions of vaudeville and musical theatre and within the Eurocentric tradition of modern dance. Inspired by Alain Locke’s proclamation of the “New Negro”, and by Charles Spurgeon Johnson’s sociological positivism, which had suggested that African Americans could gain equality in the United States by “developing their artistic abilities”, these pioneers had established a “black” form of modern dance based on “folk cultures of the rural south, the vernacular dance and music that thrived in black urban communities, and the rich African and Caribbean traditions of ritual drama and dance. Tamara Levitz (Musicologist at UCLA)14

African-American dancers drew from black traditions both creatively and to articulate sociopolitical positions. It is against this background that Syvilla Fort (1917–1975) while studying in the early 1930s at Cornish School of Applied Arts, Seattle, began exploring her African heritage. Fort, who later joined Dunham’s company was a student of Bonnie Bird, who hired the young John Cage as musical accompanist in 1938-40.

In his formative years, Cage was deeply influenced by his mentor Henry Cowell, a leading figure in American modern music. Cowell was an early enthusiast for ‘Music of the World’s People’, giving public lectures including, in Spring 1933 at the Denny Watrous Gallery in Carmel, California, rare recordings of “African pygmies, the Maori of New Zealand, Greek Shepherds as well as the peoples of the Caribbean”15, then unknown to most westerners. Cowell admired the dance music of non-western peoples, which he understood as “the first step toward

12 Aimé Césaire, ‘Discours sur le colonialisme suivi de Discours sur la Négritude’. Paris: Editions Présence Africaine, 1955 and 2004, p. 88.13 Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’, op. cit., p. 37.14 Tamara Levitz, ‘Syvilla Fort’s Africanist Modernism and John Cage’s Gestic Music: The Story of Bacchanale’ in South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 1, 200515 Ibid., p. 127

inducing the proper rhythmical urge which finally bursts into bodily expression”. 16 A composer for the famous “Big Four” of modern dance he theorised music’s relationship to dance at a stage where modern dance was still in its infancy in the United States.17 “Inspired by his study of the music of the world’s peoples, Cowell (in line with dancer Mary Wigman before him) concluded that dance should be accompanied by percussion instruments”.18

In Bird’s studio, Cage accompanied Dorothy Hermann, Syvilla Fort and Merce Cunningham (who was to become his long-term collaborator and partner). Fort invited Cage to accompany Bacchanale as part of her graduate recital in spring 1940. Professor Levitz, who has conducted extensive research on the making of Bacchanale explains that in composing the music piece:

Cage responded not only to the Africanist gestures that led him to believe Fort’s dance was about Africa, but also to her modernist bodily stance and classical expressive attitude. The sounds had to be simultaneously “African” yet modern, culturally situated yet formalized”.[…]

Cage found a sonic match for Fort’s objective, modernist Africanism by modifying a European piano so that its timbres resembled those of an instrument (African in origin) discovered in Cowell’s classes: the marimbula, or Cuban thumb piano. Ten of the twelve octave-specific pitches used in Bacchanale were prepared by placing wheatherstripping behind the strings. The last two pitches – F above and B-flat below middle C – received special preparation, with a small bolt for the former and a screw with nuts and wheatherstripping for the latter.19

…and so the prepared piano was born.

Revisiting the story behind Bacchanale allows us to question a dominant narrative that has disconnected the piece’s sonic, or rhythmic and percussive, structure from the choreography that informed its making, or more justly, for which it came into being. It also emphasises the socio-cultural and, most importantly, racial context that shaped the black body’s movements, in turn contributing to the history of American modern dance and music.

This context is all the more pregnant when looking at other early prepared piano pieces Cage composed during his collaboration with two other African American

16 Ibid., p. 126.17 Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Wiedman and Hanya Holm are known as “The Big Four” and considered the masters of modern dance.18 Tamara Levitz, “Syvilla Fort’s Africanist Modernism and John Cage’s Gestic Music: The Story of Bacchanale”, op. cit., p. 126. 19 Ibid., pp. 134-135.

dancers: Primitive (1942) created for the young prodigy Wilson Williams, and Our Spring Will Come (1943) for Trinidad-born dancer Pearl Primus. Primus’ choreography was based on Our Spring, a poem by Langston Hughes, a leading author of the Harlem Renaissance. Published in the International Literature in 1933, Our Spring was never reproduced in any of Langston Hughes subsequent publications, which makes it a rare poem. However the poem seemed to have retained its currency into the 1940s, topical in the context a segregated America, so much so that a 1944 article in the Afro-American newspaper, months after Primus’ first performed the piece, was titled: “Dancer Bases New Compositions on Langston Hughes’s Poem”. Here, neither Primus nor Cage makes the headline but Hughes. Fast forward to today, and in popular knowledge and the public sphere most searches and discussions on Our Spring Will Come lead directly to Cage’s music, and hardly ever reference the dancer, let alone the poet.

Beyond rhythmic heritage, an outlook on contemporary practice

Somewhere along the line an anecdote resurfaced about how Langston Hughes became a poet as a child – a discipline that, as his English teacher stressed, required a sense of rhythm. One of only two black children in his class, Hughes explained that he was unanimously nominated by the other pupils, who assumed that all black people had a sense of rhythm.

All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm proposes to take on this stereotypical assumption, unpack it, and complexify it by examining rhythmic sources found in material, immaterial and performative productions within African cultures and beyond. It also seeks to extend this reflection to contemporary art practice.

Opening with a newly commissioned sound piece by Em’Kal Eyongakpa using material from recent field recordings in Cameroon, the exhibition introduces a sonic environment that translates some of the artists’ concerns to reclaim and reflect on cultural heritage. These span from Ayoka Chenzira’s film Syvilla: They Dance to Her Drum (1979) a documentary on one of the forgotten heroines of American modern dance to Zak Ové’s totemic sculptures blending vintage hi-fi equipment and the aesthetic of Congolese Luba masks, to a younger generation of artists, including a selection from Larry Achiampong’s collection of Ghanaian Highlife vinyl records – a musical legacy sampled and reworked in his Meh Mogya (2011) and More Mogya (2012-13) – and Evan Ifekoya’s performative video Nature/Nurture Sketch (2013) a split-screen, cross-cultural, body response to drum’n’bass through African dance moves.

Not simply commenting on the appropriation of black Soul music and reinvention in a dance style unique to Northern England’s 1960s subculture, William Titley’s Northern Souls: The Sound of an Underground (2014)

transforms the physicality of dance into a cacophony combining echo and stamping under a creaking floor.

Sequences and repetitions are explored here through visual and non-musical pieces. Robin Rhode’s Wheel of Steel (2006) presents a series of nine photographs of a vinyl playing on a chalk drawn turntable, with marks of the tone arm indicating the record spinning. Video works by Younès Baba-Ali and Anna Raimondo explore non-musical rhythmic patterns using repetitive gesture (the nervous clicking of a pen) and voice (the word “Mediterraneo” repeated until submersion).

David Shrigley’s tragicomic Headless Drummer punctuates the exhibition with his lively beat, prompting one to wonder if rhythm is a cerebral or compulsive act. Michel Paysant’s VOX SILENTII (Eye Composing), a series of scores created with an eye tracker, evoke the inaudible musicality of our inner movements.

Julien Bayle visualises rhythmic compositions derived from methods of encoding and algorithm that have gained ground in new media arts and electronic music. Finally the music video of Vessel by Jon Hopkins remixed by Four Tet, directed by Bison, combines the glitchy syncopated electronic track with a rhythmic editing of fractal anaglyphic images of dance movements.

All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm… sets out to question dominant discourses through revisiting documented history, excavating buried narratives, and reframing some of the trajectories that have informed the way we apprehend rhythm today. Far from seeking to venture into expected terrains of cultural appropriation, or to embark on the purely sonic, the project situates itself within shifting cultural bases and the trans-disciplinary, prompting the body not to be mere a receptacle but to also physically engage with notions of pace and movements, and respond to those rhythmic patterns, and that beat, that have contributed to contemporary culture.

Christine Eyene

Zak OvéCulture Remix, 2013

1970s turntable, cast Jesmonite African maskCourtesy the artist

Article published in The Afro American, 15 April 1944, New York.

Evan IfekoyaNature/Nurture sketch, 2013

Video, 6 min 12 secCourtesy the artist

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LIST OF WORKS

1. Em’Kal Eyongakpa VIII-03 (study), 2015Sound, 9 min 34 secXXIV-04 (in a bubble), 2015Sound, 8 min 6 secProduced with the technical support of Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and KHaL!SHRINE. Courtesy the artist and KHaL!SHRINE

2. Zak OvéCulture Remix, 20131970s turntable, cast Jesmonite African maskCourtesy the artist

3. John CageBacchanale, 1940From ‘Prepared Piano Music Volume I, 1940-47’Edition Peters, New York

4. Ayoka ChenziraSyvilla: They Dance to the Rhythm of Her Drum, 197916mm transferred to video, 30 minCourtesy the artist and Cinenova, London

5. John CagePrimitive, 1942Ibid.

6. Langston HughesOur Spring, 1933First published ‘International Literature’, Moscow 1933

7. John CageOur Spring Will Come, 1943Ibid.

8. Larry AchiampongIn The House of My Mother #2, 2015Sofa and armchair covered with Kente cloth, record player and two vinyl records ‘Meh Mogya’, 2011 and ‘More Mogya’, 2012Courtesy the artist

9. Larry AchiampongIn The House of My Mother #1, 2015Vinyl record sleevesCourtesy the artist

10. Zak Ové The Upsetters (King and Queen), 2013Mixed MediaCourtesy the artist

11. Evan IfekoyaNature/Nurture sketch, 2013Video, 6 min 12 secCourtesy the artist

12. Michel PaysantVOX SILENT II (Eye Composing), 2010-201512 digital prints of eye-drawn partitionsCo-produced with Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Courtesy the artist

13. Julien BayleUncommon Circles (part 1), 2013 Generative process rendered and captured in March 2015, 5 min 55 sec Courtesy the artist

14. Julien BayleUncommon Circles (part 2), 2013 Generative process rendered and captured in March 2015, 6 min 02 sec Courtesy the artist

15. Julien BayleUncommon Circles (part 3), 2013Generative process rendered and captured in March 2015, 7 min 48 sec Courtesy the artist

16. David ShrigleyHeadless Drummer, 2012Animation, 1 min continuous loopCopyright the artist. Courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery (London), Anton Kern Gallery (New York), Galerie Francesca Pia (Zurich), BQ (Berlin) and Galleri Nicolai Wallner (Copenhagen)

17. Younès Baba-Ali Tic Nerveux, 2009Three-screen videoCourtesy the artist

18. Robin RhodeWheel of Steel, 2006Digital pigment prints mounted on board, nine partsEach: 39.4 x 55.9 cm, edition of five. Copyright Robin Rhode, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

19. William TitleyNorthern Souls: The Sound of an Underground, 2014Sound transferred from 12 inch vinyl, 19 min 14 sec

20. Anna RaimondoMediterraneo, 2014Video, 22 minCourtesy the artist

21. Jon HopkinsVessel (Four Tet remix), 2010Video, 4 min 8 secCinematography by Christopher Nunn. Courtesy Domino Recording, Just Publishing, Bison Productions

22. Zak OvéStella by Starlight, 2013Mixed media, cast Jesmonite masks, vintage turntables

23. Zak Ové Black Astronaut, 2012Tree root, painted in bitumen, brass hunting horns, antique tribal mask, crocodile skull, lost shoe soles, copper nails

24. Zak OvéTwenty Two Fifty, 2013Mixed media, cast Jesmonite masks, vintage turntables

CURATORChristine Eyene (b. 1970, Cameroon) is Guild Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire. She is collaborating to Making Histories Visible, an interdisciplinary visual art research project based at UCLan’s Centre for Contemporary Art led by Lubaina Himid MBE, Professor of Contemporary Art. Her subject areas include the work of South African photographer George Hallett produced in the UK in the 1970s and 80s, Black British Art of the 1980s, contemporary African art, gendered perspectives in contemporary art and non-object-based art practices. Eyene has curated exhibitions internationally, notably for Format International Photography Festival, UK, 2015; Summer of Photography, Bozar, Brussels, 2014; Dak’Art: Biennale of Contemporary African Art, Dakar, 2012; Photoquai: Biennial of World Images, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris and Gwanza: Photography Festival, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, both in 2011.

ARTISTSLarry Achiampong (b. 1984, UK) is a British-Ghanaian artist living and working in London. He completed an MA in Sculpture at Slade School of Fine Art (2008). His practice uses live performance, imagery and sound to explore representations of identity in the post-digital age and the dichotomies found within a world dominated by cut-copy-paste facebook/tumblr/youtube-based cultures. Achiampong has exhibited, performed and presented projects in various institutions within the UK and abroad including Tate Britain/Modern, London; Hauptbahnhof (dOCUMENTA 13), Kassel; Iniva, London; Modern Art Oxford, Oxford; New Art Exchange, Nottingham; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; and the Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation, Accra.

Younes Baba Ali (b. 1986, Morocco) lives and works in Brussels and Casablanca. His practice is sited mostly in public space or places uncommon to art practice and mixes technology, objects, sound, video and photography with political, social and ecological issues. His works are context-specific and take their final form in dialogue with its spectators. He has participated in several international exhibitions and biennials among them Digital Africa: The Future is Now, Southbank Centre, London; Where are we now? 5th Marrakech Biennial; Travail, mode d’emploi, Centrale for Contemporary Art,

Brussels; Dak’Art, 10th African Contemporary Art Biennial, Dakar; Regionale 12, Haus für elektronische Künste, Basel. He was rewarded by the Léopold Sédar Senghor prize, during the 2012 African Contemporary Art Biennial of Dakar and the Boghossian prize during the Belgian Art Prize Art’Contest in Brussels in 2014.

Julien Bayle (b. 1976, France) lives and works in Marseille. He began experimenting with sequencing through sound and music in 1990. Working at the juncture of visual and sound, he seeks to merge visual art, music composition, physical approach to sound art and data visualization by creating advanced programmed installations and audio/visual live performances. Bayle teaches digital arts at École Supérieure d’Art et de Design Marseille-Méditerrannée since 2013. He is currently playing his live project ALPHA which involves sounds, visuals and algorithms. He collaborates with LMA-CNRS (Mechanical & Acoustic Lab) and is about to start an hybrid art/science PhD.

John Cage (1912 – 1992, USA) was one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century, as well as a music theorist, writer and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Cage pioneered the prepared piano (a piano which sound is altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), which he used to compose numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces.

Ayoka Chenzira (b. 1953, USA) is an artist, educator and an award-winning film and video artist. A pioneer in Black independent cinema, Chenzira is noted as the first African-American woman animator. Chenzira has worked and lectured extensively on film throughout the United States, South America, and Europe; traversing the African continent collecting oral narratives from women, as well as training emerging filmmakers. As professor of film at The City College of New York, she taught filmmaking for nearly twenty years and co-created the MFA program in Media Arts Production in 1996. Her films are held in a number of permanent collections including the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum.

Em’kal Eyongakpa (b. 1981, Cameroon) lives and works in Yaoundé, Cameroon. His mixed media installations, video, photography and performance explore human conditioning, identity and the creation and

consumption of information and ideology. Drawing on dreams, visions and observations, Em’kal Eyongakpa approaches the experienced and the unknown through an almost ritual use of repetition and transformation He was an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2013-2014) and at Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2015).

Jon Hopkins (b. 1979, UK) is a producer and musician who writes and performs his own melodic electronica and dance music. He has produced albums by Coldplay, Massive Attack, Brian Eno and Herbie Hancock and this year released the mix album Late Night Tales, which includes tracks by artists such as Darkstar, Teebs, Nils Frahm, Letherette and Four Tet. Hopkins has twice been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, in 2011 and 2013. He is represented by Just Music and Domino Records.

Langston Hughes (1902—1967, USA) was an African American poet and writer celebrated as one of the foremost interpreters to the world of the black experience in the United States. Hughes wrote A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956) and the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro (1949) and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958; with Arna Bontemps). He was also widely known for his comic character Jesse B. Semple, familiarly called Simple, who appeared in Hughes’s columns in the Chicago Defender and the New York Post and later in book form and on the stage.

Evan Ifekoya (b. 1988, Nigeria) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in London, who explores the politicisation of culture, society and aesthetics. Ifekoya’s work uses appropriated material from historical archives and contemporary society; by ‘queerying’ popular imagery and using the props of everyday life, it aims to destroy the aura of preciousness surrounding art. Recent exhibitions include Studio Voltaire OPEN, London, 2015 and 30 years of the Future at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 214-15. Recent performances at Iniva, Ovalhouse Theatre and Rich Mix, London, as well as The Marlborough, Brighton and ngbk, Berlin. Evan works collaboratively as part of Collective Creativity: Critical reflections into QTIPOC creative practice.

Zak Ové (b. 1966, UK) lives and works in London and Trinidad and practises between sculpture, film and photography. His practice seeks to reignite and reinterpret lost cultures using new-world materials, whilst paying tribute to both spiritual and artistic African identity. His work is the outcome of his

documentation of, and anthropological interest in, diasporic and African history, specifically that which is explored through Trinidadian carnival filtered through his own personal and cultural upbringing, growing up in London and Trinidad.

Michel Paysant (b. 1955, France) lives and works in Paris. Paysant is an experimental artist whose work brings together art, science and technology. Paysant has been exhibiting his work for thirty years in various venues including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée du Louvre, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Centraal Museum, Utrecht; MUDAM, Luxembourg, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologne; Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo. He recently featured in Monacopolis at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, 2013.

Anna Raimondo (b. 1981, Italy) lives in Brussels and works internationally. Her works, articulated as voice, language and sonic ambulation, lie in- between sound and radio art, installation and urban intervention. She has participated in several international exhibitions and festivals including the solo show Beyond voice. Me, you and everyone who is listening at Arte Contemporanea Bruxelles, Belgium; the festival Artefact at STUK, Leuven, Belgium; the 5th Marrakech Biennale, Morocco; the collective sound exhibition Dirty Ear at Errant Bodies, Berlin; and the public sound art festival Paraphrasing Babel in Maastricht, Netherlands. Her radiophonic works have been broadcast internationally and she is co-editor, with Younes Baba-Ali, of the radio and sound art platform Saout Radio.

Robin Rhode (b. 1976, South Africa) is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist who works with a variety of visual languages such as photography, performance, drawing and sculpture to create beautiful narratives that are brought to life using quotidian materials such as soap, charcoal, chalk and paint. Solo exhibitions include The Drawing Center, New York, 2015; Museum of Art Lucerne, Switzerland, 2014; White Cube, London, 2011; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010; Hayward Gallery, London, 2008; and Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 2007.

David Shrigley (b. 1968, UK) lives and works in Glasgow. Shrigley is an artist and illustrator best known for his mordantly humorous cartoons. Self-branded as an outsider in the art world, Shrigley is known for making flat

compositions that take on the inconsequential, the bizarre, and the disquieting elements of everyday life. Shrigley’s work has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2013, he was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize for his solo show David Shrigley: Brain Activity at the Hayward Gallery in London.

William Titley (b. 1966, UK) lives and works in Burnley as a multimedia artist whose work plays on ideas around spatial ownership including notions of home, borders, and socio-cultural spaces. From local histories, digital media and hybrid landscapes to political boundaries, social situations and local cultures, his work uncovers aspects of environments, cultures and a sense of place. Titley is a Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston and Co-Director/Founder of In-Situ: a non-profit arts organisation based in East Lancashire. Titley is research active within the area of art and design: history, theory and practice. He is a member of Collaborative Engagements.

EVENTSThurs 4 JunOpening Reception with performance of John Cage, Bacchanale, 1940 on prepared piano by pianist Siwan Rhys.

Sat 13 JunCurator’s Tour with curator Christine Eyene.

Sat 11 JulyAn Evening of Live Music with artists Julien Bayle, Larry Achiamong and Evan Ifekoya.

Sat 1 AugCurator’s Tour with curator Christine Eyene.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSCurators’ Series #8. All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm is curated by Christine Eyene. It is produced at DRAF by Sandra Pusterhofer (Curator) and Benedict Goodwin (Installation Manager) with Alex Roberts, Fraser Hamilton, Francesco Gorni and Harry Lawson. This leaflet is edited by Rachel Cass (Development and Communications Manager) and Dan Munn.

Thanks to all the artists who have contributed works to the exhibition, and also their galleries, for their trust and commitment.

DRAF Curators’ Series is supported by Arts Council England. All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm is supported by The African Arts Trust.

Cinenova (London), Vigo (London), Stephen Friedman (London), Collection Laurence Dreyfus and Lehmann Maupin (New York) have generously loaned works to the exhibition.

Michel Paysant’s VOX SILENTII (Eye Composing) is a co-production with Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, particular thanks to Marie-Claude Beaud and François Larini. Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, provided technical support to Em’kal Eyongakpa during production of VIII-03 (study) and XXIV-04 (in a bubble).

DRAF CURATORS’ SERIES supports international curators by commissioning special research-based projects, considering the curator as an author. The series supports independent curators, who are able to develop original research and proposals without institutional constraints. Previous participants include Cylena Simonds (UK), Raimundas Malasauskas (Lithuania), Mihnea Mircan (Romania), Mathieu Copeland (UK), Simone Menegoi (Italy) and Chris Sharp (US), Pablo Leon de la Barra (Mexico), Natasha Ginwala (India), Vivian Ziherl (Australia).

DRAFDRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation) is an independent, non-profit space for contemporary art in London founded in 2007. It is directed and curated by Vincent Honoré. DRAF presents an international programme of exhibitions, commissions, live events, discussions and projects. DRAF is located at Symes Mews, 37 Camden High Street, Mornington Crescent, London NW1 7JE.

The David Roberts Art Foundation Limited is a registered charity in England and Wales (No.1119738). It is proudly supported by the Edinburgh House Estates group of companies.

For more information see www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com

ADDRESS

DRAFSymes MewsLondon NW1 7JE

+44 (0)20 7383 3004

The nearest tube stations are Mornington Crescent and Camden Town.DRAF is a 15 minute walk from Kings Cross St. Pancras. Buses: 24, 27, 29, 88, 134, 168, 214, 253

OPENING TIMES

Thu - Sat, 12 - 6 pmTue - Wed by appointment

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FREE ADMISSION

ALSO ON DISPLAYSTUDY #8. MONUMENT STALAGMITE/P.T.A.C., STERLING RUBYGALLERY 5

Ruby’s five metre high free-standing sculpture will be shown with two other of his works in the David Roberts Collection, and a new commissioned text by curator Alessandro Rabottini. REBECCA ACKROYD, CELEBRITY SKIN, 2015LIBRARY, FIRST FLOOR Between June-December 2015, Royal Academy student Rebecca Ackroyd presents a sculptural intervention in the DRAF library.

SAVE THE DATEThurs 24 Sept 2015Opening Reception, 7–9pm

DRAF launches a new first floor space dedicated to performances and talks, a unique new live institute in London. A new exhibition with works from the David Roberts Collection by Etel Adnan, Ida Applebroog, Philip Guston, Sergej Jensen, Hans Josephsohn, Oscar Murillo, Andreas Slominski and Michael E. Smith.