Travelling on the London rail service to Mornington Crescent on a Friday afternoon I came out of the station to be immediately confronted with a cacophony of noise and chaos. Pathways being excavated revealing deep cuts into the concrete uprooting pipes and clay. The drill became the beat of the street while digging machines crunched on wires and stones.
The gallery was tucked down a small alleyway and in the distance you could hear many beats and voices, beckoning me on into the space. The show was comprised of five large rooms, each containing a thoughtfully curated collection of artworks varying from music notation, poetry, video, sound, and sculpture.
I spent some time listening to a sound work by Em’Kal Eyongakpa which drew its influences from many of the works within the show itself. Opening with the line ‘At the bottom of the Atlantic ocean is a railroad made of human bones’ rooted the spoken work and set time in motion in a striking and visual way in my mind. Eyongakpa used the lines ‘I on air’ or ‘ in a bubble’ as a form of repetition in the piece, which in retrospect spoke volumes in relation to the permeable and eliptic way in which the show felt as a whole body of work.
In the corner opposite the sound work was a sculpture by artist Zak Ové featuring a Congolese Kuba mask which had been fixed to a disk jockeys deck set. The needle fixed in its place- the mask had changing the function of the turntable as if claiming as its host – the music is lost, stuck perhaps playing the same rhythm phrase over and over again. I enjoyed this work on the idea of play in a mechanical, historical and musical sense. The mask representing a culture of symbolism and identity and the decks have consequently become relics or part of something that is viewed as sacred.