UPCOMING

AFTER NATURE | 21 NOV 2025 - 14 FEB 2026

About the Exhibition

Proposition and CLOSE are delighted to announce that after a very successful showing at CLOSE in Somerset, the acclaimed group exhibition, After Nature, will transfer to Proposition Bethnal Green.

Featuring internationally acclaimed artists such as Richard Long and David Nash, After Nature also includes work by overlooked pioneers and next generation talent, including Mercedes Balle, Chris Dury, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Alex Hartley, Magnus Hammick, Simon Hitchens, Tania Kovats, Alastair & Fleur Mackie, Onya McCausland, Nissa Nishikawa, Aimee Parrott, Lotte Scott and Fred Sorrell. The exhibition offers a timely exploration of the ways in which artists are looking at and thinking about nature in the twenty-first century, with works spanning a range of media, including sculpture, ceramics, drawing, painting and photography.

After Nature explores ways of making art 'after' nature, in imitation of natural forms and systems, but it is inevitably haunted by the idea of coming after nature too. It is now more than three decades since the American author and environmentalist Bill McKibben published The End of Nature (1989), one of the first books written for a general audience which warned of the imminent climate crisis, suggesting that we now live in a ‘post-natural world’ (so great and so pervasive has the impact of humanity been on the non-human). Yet in 2025 we find ourselves living in a world where extreme weather events are increasingly common, and political leaders question the reality of climate change and double down on fossil fuel extraction.

Artists have long addressed the complexities of these issues, often quietly and non-polemically, but with subtle power and insistence. By making work that interrogates the ways in which culture can represent and reflect the environment, art can perhaps offer us new ways of understanding our present predicament. This is therefore a show both for and about the present moment, an exhibition for a time of environmental collapse, for a quickening emergency.

The exhibition was originally conceived for CLOSE, a gallery in Somerset that sits within a rural landscape, much of which has been rewilded. In that context the exhibition seemed to speak to its setting, the works entering into a dialogue with their surroundings, creating a powerful connection between inside and outside. Proposition offers a very different context. Embedded in one of the biggest cities in the world, Proposition exists to ‘provoke reimagination and action around the potential positive impact that our civilisation can have on biodiversity and ecological resilience.’ The organisation’s ethos is that art can allow us to ‘build connections, inspire emotion and engage people in a creative and innovative way that can raise awareness and make [the issues we face] more accessible.’

In the heart of London’s east end, After Nature, which reflects upon our relationships with nature, becomes a form of resistance, an alternative way of thinking forward at a time of climate emergency.

Curated by Ben Tufnell

Visit the Exhibition

• Open Wednesday - Saturday, 12pm - 7pm

• Proposition Bethnal Green, 279 Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 0EL

• Private view: Thursday 20th November at 6.00pm - 8.30pm. RSVP: rsvp@propositionstudios.com

Artist Biographies

Chris Drury (b.1948) is an environmental artist, known internationally for his site-specific nature based sculptures. He also makes gallery-based installations and sculptures, works on paper, and  digital and video art. Drury’s work makes connections between different phenomena in the world,  specifically between Nature and Culture, Inner and Outer and Microcosm and Macrocosm. To this  end he collaborates with scientists and technicians from a broad spectrum of disciplines. Recent  projects include a residency at The Nirox Foundation in The Cradle of Humankind, South Africa,  working with palaeontologists, geologists and anthropologists, and a British Antarctic Survey  residency in Antarctica. 

For After Nature, Drury shows works on paper from ‘Exchange’, a project made on farms in West  Dorset, alongside a monumental wall-drawing depicting a mushroom spore print, made with dust  and ash from CLOSE. 

Chris Drury has exhibited internationally since the 1980s. Notable solo exhibitions include Les  Jardins Des Arts, Chateaubourg, France (2022), Salon Vert, Geneva (2019), Oppland Art Centre,  Lillehammer, Norway (2014), Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh (2011) and Nevada Museum of Art, Reno  (2008). Recent group exhibitions include Groundwork, King’s Lynn (2021) and Nevada Museum of  Art (2020). His work is held in international collections including V&A, London, British Museum,  London, Arts Council Collection, London, Government Art Collection, London, Wellcome  Collection, London, Leeds Art Gallery, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, Whitworth Art Gallery,  Manchester, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, North Carolina Museum of Art and the Nevada Museum of  Art. 

Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (b.1982). is a multidisciplinary artist examining our fraught  relationships with nature and technology. Through artworks, writing and curatorial projects,  Ginsberg’s work explores subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology,  conservation, biodiversity and evolution, as she investigates the human impulse to “better” the 

world. She experiments with simulation, representation and the nonhuman perspective to question  the contemporary fixation on innovation over conservation, despite the environmental crisis. 

For After Nature, Ginsberg shows prints from an experimental interspecies living artwork, Pollinator  Pathmaker. Pollinator Pathmaker is an artwork for pollinators, planted and cared for by humans,  and was originally commissioned by the Eden Project. 

Ginsburg has exhibited internationally, including at MoMA New York, the Museum of Contemporary  Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of China, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Bildmuseet, Umea,  Serpentine Gallery, London and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Her work is held in private and  museum permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Hewitt  Smithsonian Design Museum, Therme Art and ZKM Karlsruhe. 

Magnus Hammick (b.1971) is a painter and performance artist. Hammick graduated from Oxford  University and emerged as one of the key figures in the Young British Art movement in the 1990s.  His work was included in Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal  Academy of Arts, London, in 1997. His work is held in many private and public collections. 

Hammick is also an environmentalist and entrepreneur and has devoted his time to developing  products that actively lower our carbon emissions. He balances this with an art practice which  focuses on nature and his relationship to it.  

The ‘First Light’ series, exhibited at CLOSE in 2024, are derived from Hammick’s daily dawn walking  ritual during which he photographs the same oak tree, thereby documenting the cyclical nature of  the seasons. 

Alex Hartley (b.1963). Hartley’s work addresses complicated and sometimes contradictory  attitudes toward the built and natural environments, showing us new ways of physically  experiencing and thinking about our constructed surroundings. In The Houses he brings together  photographic and overlaid painterly elements to examine the idea of the viewpoint, the frame and  the boundary – between interior and exterior, manmade and natural environments, public and  private space, two and three dimensions. Iconic examples of modernist domestic architecture,  photographed by the artist over the past twenty-five years, primarily in Los Angeles, form the basis  of these atmospheric monochrome works, in which the photographic image lies separated beneath  hand-painted elements which describe and embellish a verdant landscape. Crucially, the works  embody an uncanny ambiguity. In some images the manmade structures seem to be overwhelmed  and overrun by the vegetation. From another perspective, the images can be read as exploring the  ways in which man inserts himself into nature. 

Hartley graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1990 and lives and works in London and Devon.  He has exhibited internationally since the 1990s. His works are in collections including the Arts  Council Collection, London, Government Art Collection, London, Caldic Collection, Rotterdam and  the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna. 

Simon Hitchens (b.1967). Known primarily as a sculptor, Hitchens has exhibited internationally  since the 1990s. Much of his work explores the materiality and meaning of rock. He says, ‘My  sculptures subtly investigate the essence of the things we perceive: the physical world, nature and  our place within it. I am fascinated by rock: historically as a medium to make sculpture, physically 

as the very earth that supports us and geologically as the almost ageless constant that resonates  through time, giving perspective to our lives on this planet.’ 

Epoch - 07.41 Glatting Beacon 16.01 (2024) is a new work from an ongoing series of durational  drawings, tracing the outlines of the shadows cast by a rock throughout a single day. For the first  time Hitchens presents both drawing and the rock, a piece of flint, creating a dynamic relationship  between the two. 

Concurrently with After Nature, Simon Hitchens will exhibit in Frieze Sculpture in Regent’s Park,  London 

Tania Kovats (b.1966). makes drawings, sculpture, installations and large-scale time-based  projects that explore our experience and understanding of the natural world. While she is perhaps  best known for her sculptures and drawings, her work encompasses a range of creative strategies,  from map-making to writing, and she is also active as a curator, teacher and author. Kovats’ enduring themes are the experience and understanding of landscape, geological processes,  patterns of growth and the intersection of landscape, nature and culture and how art can speak to  our critical climate crisis.  

The Last of My Summer Blooms (2023), made with Dahlia flowers from the artist’s garden, evoke  not only the inevitable decay in nature and the passing of the seasons, but the passing of Kovats’  own fertility, as she enters the menopause. She writes: ‘The natural dyes of the blooms are  released and stain the paper, while the petals merge with the fibres of the paper. As they dry, they  are fixed as these beautiful ghost flowers, quiet memorials to the sweet joys and melancholy of late  summer. I started to make these works as I became postmenopausal. The works mark the end of  my body’s fertility and my menstrual cycle stopping; a clock that has been keeping regular time  since I was ten years old.’  

Kovats studied at Newcastle Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. Notable recent solo  exhibitions include Museum Beelden am Zee, The Netherlands (2025), Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh  (2024), Parafin, London (2023, 2021), Berwick Gymnasium (2019), Phoenix Gallery, Exeter (2019),  Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester (2016) and Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2014).  Important recent group exhibitions include Earthbound, New Art Gallery, Walsall (2024), Planet  Ocean, The Box, Plymouth (2024), Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood, Water, Pallant House Gallery,  Chichester (2022), UnNatural History (curated by Invisible Dust), Herbert Museum & Art Gallery,  Coventry (2021), Future Knowledge, Modern Art Oxford (2018), Women Power Protest, Birmingham  Museum and Art Gallery (2018) and Vita Vitale, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2015). 

Kovats’ work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Arts Council  Collection, London, British Council, London, National Maritime Museum, London, Government Art  Collection, London, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Jupiter  Artland, Edinburgh, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven and the  Speed Museum, Kentucky. Public artworks are permanently installed at the Natural History  Museum, London, Government Art Collection at Admiralty House, London, Fruitmarket Gallery,  Edinburgh and the Barbraham Research Campus in Cambridge. Kovats is currently Professor of  Drawing and Making at DJCAD, University of Dundee.

Richard Long (b.1945). Considered one of the most influential artists of his generation, Richard  Long’s works have extended the possibilities of sculpture beyond traditional materials and  methods. Central to Long’s work is the activity of walking. Long’s walking works are represented by  photographs and texts, but he also makes sculptures using natural materials, both in the  landscape and in the gallery. 

Long first used mud as a material in 1969. After Nature includes a large work made in River Avon  mud (sourced close to Long’s home in Bristol) in which the liquid mud, directed by the artist’s  energetic gestures, splashes, drips and runs. Two small works on paper are made by simply  dipping the sheets of paper into a bath of mud and drawing them out.  

Richard Long lives and works between London and Bristol. Recent solo exhibitions include  Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2023), M Leuven, Leuven, Belgium (2021), De Pont  Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands (2019), Arnolfini, Bristol (2015), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, (2010)  and Tate Britain, London (2009). He represented Britain at the 37th Venice Biennale (1976) and won  the Turner Prize in 1989. He received the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the  French Ministry of Culture (1990) and was awarded Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in the field of  sculpture (2009). He was knighted in the 2018 Honours List. 

Long’s work is held in major museum collections worldwide. In May 2025, The National Gallery unveiled Long’s Mud Sun a new permanent commission for the gallery’s refurbished Sainsbury Wing.  

Alistair & Fleur Mackie (b. 1977) Alastair grew up in a farming community in the south of Cornwall,  while Fleur’s childhood was split between Cameroon, France and the UK. They met at art school in  London in the late 1990s, and over time their work has evolved into a close collaboration. In 2011,  they moved to North Cornwall, the landscape of which has played a central part in shaping their  vocabulary. Typically constructed from diligently sourced, often site-specific objects, their works  possess a cyclical quality – building a dialogue with the circumstances of their origins, sparking  connections across time and space and offering commentary on the intersection of ecology and  anthropology. 

Alastair and Fleur Mackie have exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally. Recent solo  exhibitions include Projected Outcomes, KARST, Plymouth (2025) and Between The Dog and The  Wolf, Copperfield, London (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Catch Me If You Can, ERES  Foundation, Munich (2024), We Are Floating in Space, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange,  Penzance (2023), Works from the Olbricht Collection, Museum Folkwang, Essen (2022), Formen  der Nature, Museum Villa Rot, Germany (2018) and Doing Identity, Kunstmuseum Bochum,  Germany (2018). In 2025 they curated a group show entitled Afterimage for Tremenheere Sculpture  Gardens, Penzance. They have worked on a number of public commissions, and their work is held  in international collections including The Eres Foundation in Munich and the Wellcome Collection  in London. 

Onya McCausland (b. 1971). McCausland’s paintings explore ideas of landscape using materials  which are sourced from and evoke specific locations. Her new paintings in After Nature are made  using ochre and copper sulphate, materials that are by-products of iron and copper mining,  sourced from decommissioned mines. 

McCausland’s practice develops an environmentalism that addresses the materials and  materiality of how painting and paint relates to the Earth (as being made from chemical elements  and processes) and human cultures, as well as traditions of art that relate to specific sites and  places. 

McCausland studied painting at Falmouth School of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art, where  she returned to complete a PhD between 2014-17. In 1995 she was an external recipient of the  Slade's Boise Travel Scholarship. In 2018 she was awarded a three year Post Doctoral Early Career  Fellowship from the Leverhulme Foundation. During this time established Turning Landscape CIC,  a community interest company making paint from waste iron residues forming from polluting mine  waters in the South Wales village of Six Bells. In 2022 the company received funding from the  Heritage Lottery Fund Wales to establish an arts and educational programme alongside paint  making. In 2020 she established a research and reading group called Environment, Ecology,  Sustainability, and was appointed Head of Undergraduate Painting in at the Slade School of Fine  Art in 2022. 

Recent exhibitions include Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art, Norrtälje Konsthall, Sweden,  Akureyri Museum, Iceland and Karsten Schubert Gallery, London.  

David Nash (b.1945) is widely regarded as one of the foremost artists working with trees and wood  internationally. He studied at Kingston College of Art 1963-67 and at Chelsea School of Art 1969- 70. Since his solo exhibitions were in 1973, he has exhibited extensively around the world.  

Nash’s work has been included in numerous important international group exhibitions since 1970,  including The Condition of Sculpture, at the Hayward Gallery, London (1975), British Art Now: An  American Perspective, at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York and tour (1980), British  Sculpture in the Twentieth Century, Part II, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1981) and  Aspects of British Art Today, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in (1982). Important recent solo  exhibitions include National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, Royal  Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, and the Fondation Fernet-Branca, St Louis, France.  

Nash has works in over 80 major public collections around the world including Tate, London,  Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Centre  Pompidou, Paris, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Nash  lives and works in North Wales. 

Nissa Nishikawa (born 1981). Nissa Nishikawa’s multidimensional practice comprises  performance, poetry, painting, sculpture and moving image. She researches and interprets  traditional forms of dance, ritual and craft in ways that illuminate animistic and alchemical  philosophies with an embodied and structural approach. Nishikawa often works in the open-air  and studios equipped to house fire; interconnecting the layers of the arcane with the supra sensual, the living earth and various conscious inhabitants. 

In After Nature, Nishikawa exhibits new sculptures, ceramics fired with organic materials gathered  from the landscape around CLOSE. 

Nissa Nishikawa studied at Concordia University, Montreal, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art,  London and Goldsmiths, London. Recent solo exhibitions and performances include Camden Arts 

Centre, London (2024), Somerset House (2022), Nottingham Contemporary (2021) and The  Wellcome Trust, London (2019). 

Aimee Parrott (b.1987). Organic motifs – seeds, feathers, plants – permeate Aimée Parrott’s work.  Her forms suggest a sense of movement and allude to growth. Her abstract work suggests  interconnectivity with the environment, where unnamable microbial forms add to the overall  impression of a relationship between the micro and the macro, evolution and deep time. While her  work may read like abstractions her sensitivity to/for representational motifs reveal her interest in  the transformations observed in ecological or geological structures and other matter. 

Recent works continue to explore the disjunction between internal sensations and exterior  impressions with works that hover between gesture and form, suggesting hybridity, metamorphosis  and a symbiotic blurring of boundaries. Many employ natural materials, plant-based dyes and inks. 

Aimée Parrott studied at University College Falmouth and Royal Academy Schools. Recent solo  exhibitions include Parafin, London (2023), Mackintosh Lane, London (2022), Broadway Gallery,  Letchworth Garden City (2020) and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2018). She has  participated in numerous group exhibitions including Thread Suns: Anna Higgins and Aimee  Parrott, Ione & Mann, London (2025), The Conference of the Birds at Tristan Hoare Gallery, London  (2022), Superpower at Sim Smith Gallery, London (2022), Secret of Lightness at Parafin, London  (2022) and ‘The Studio at 4am’ at Hastings Contemporary (2020). In 2024 one of Parrott’s paintings  was acquired by the Arts Council Collection. 

Lotte Scott (b.1990). Lotte Scott was born in London but grew up in Somerset. She studied at  Goldsmiths and then at the Slade School of Fine Art. In 2020 she was the recipient of the Gilchrist  Fisher Award for artists under 30 working with the theme of Landscape.  

Recent exhibitions include Lexis Over Land at the Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens Gallery, Liquid  Land at Anglia Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, Fragile Nature at Groundwork Gallery, King’s Lynn, and a  solo show, The Fields are Seas, at OUTPOST, Norwich. As part of SAW Festival in 2019 she  exhibited A Long Hundred in a monastic fishery building near Glastonbury. 

In 2024 Scott was commissioned by the Mendip Hills National Landscape Team in partnership with  Somerset Art Works, to create Ash Viewing. The project began with Scott making lime from Mendip  stone, creating a limewash that was used to cover an entire ash tree felled due to ash dieback  disease. The tree was installed in a stone barn, creating a poignant artwork highlighting issues of  environmental change and degradation. Subsequently, Scott turned the tree into charcoal. 

Fred Sorrell (b.1984) Sorrell’s work constitutes an open-ended enquiry into the nature of  perception. His position is that an abstract painting can be autonomous – an image that exists in  purely visual terms - but that it can also communicate something of its inspiration. He describes  the dynamic space between visceral bodily sensation and fleeting visual impressions as the  starting point for his work. Physical and sensory experiences are rendered into pictorial structures  that then serve as a launch pad from which a new image can emerge. Importantly, the paintings  also address the temporal or ephemeral nature of these visual/visceral experiences. Just as the  observation of visual phenomena in nature unfolds over time, rather than being fixed in a single  instant (as in a photograph) Sorrell’s paintings are carefully calibrated to reward extended viewing. 

Many of his works are rooted in the experience of landscape, light and nature, as suggested by  titles such as Coast (2022), Orchard (2022) and Standing Meditation (2024).  

Sorrell studied at Falmouth College University (2004-8). Recent solo exhibitions include Parafin,  London (2022, 2020) and Between Sea and Sky, Saturation Point, London (2019). He has  participated in numerous group exhibitions including Landscapes of Time and Memory, Fred  Levine, Bruton (2925), Expanding Landscapes: Painting After Land Art, Abbot Hall Art Gallery,  Kendal (2025) and Hestercombe House & Gallery (2024), Royal Standard, Liverpool, and Cob  Gallery, London. He has undertaken residencies at The Banff Centre, The Florence Trust, London, Takt, Berlin and Kerel de Grote Hogeschool, Antwerp.

ARCHIVE

A PERCEPTUAL ZONE | 1 OCT 2025 - 25 OCT 2025

Proposition is honoured to announce A Perceptual Zone — a month-long exploration of dance in dialogue with the elements. Born from bodies attuning to land, season, and storm, it coalesces in continual contact with the biosphere.

Dance arises from the necessity to respond, moving in step with shifting conditions, shaped by the forces of nature. It is an origin of ecological art: wisdom inscribed in fascia, constellations of movement resonant with animals and elemental intelligences. It proposes an ethics of listening and being-with. It unfolds as a communion with what exceeds the self: the stretch of trees into sky, vibration of soil, pressure of air, gravitational pull of another body.  In this reciprocity, rhythm becomes a living cycle — an environmental intimacy through which the human is re-imagined.

Throughout the month, artists Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Nicol Vizioli, Nissa Nishikawa, Kapila Venu, Lewis Walker, and Yen-Ching Lin will offer workshops, installations, film, photography, and performance within the galleries. Their practices, experimental and traditional, are gestures that honour the earth while remembering dance as both instinct and offering.

Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome will initiate the month, holding public somatic workshops rooted in the potentials of collective embodied power while building towards a Saturday evening performance-in-progress centred within ecologies of liveness, risk, care, and access. 

For the second week in Gallery I, Nicol Vizioli and Nissa Nishikawa will present a series of 12 C-Type photographs extended from handmade black and white fibre darkroom prints sourced from their ongoing collaboration of dance-journeys in open-air spaces. In Gallery II, during this same week, a film by Kapila Venu titled Yakshi will be screened on continuous rotation. The film holds image, landscape, sound and character from the folklore of Kerala. There will be a finissage on the Saturday evening with Vizioli and Nishikawa present to discuss their processes.

Lewis Walker will activate the galleries in the third week with open workshops focused on research and development into deeper states of consciousness, encompassing rituals of shared energy and expression. On Saturday evening, they will exhibit the culmination of the week's work for all to experience and attend.

In the fourth week Yen-Chin Lin will be offering three improvisational movement workshops open to everyone, regardless of dance experience. Her pedagogical practice aims to deepen awareness through the connection of body and emotions. This will also be extended to a final Saturday evening public sharing session.  

A Perceptual Zone is not performance alone. It is an opening, a space for moving together and witnessing, a centre where dance becomes relation, navigating the currents of co-existence.

Curated by Nissa Nishikawa

LOCUS OF VOICES I 20 Jun 2025 - 17 Sep 2025

In a time of escalating planetary crisis, Locus of Voices offers a vision for resilience and renewal — frameworks and calls to move against systems of extraction and division.

This group exhibition embodies the perspective that unity is not uniformity, as with biodiversity, it flourishes through multiplicity. It asks us: How does interconnectedness speak?

The constellation of featured artists creates tactile and temporal encounters with materiality, illuminating biospheric rhythms through installation, sculpture, dance, painting, music, film, and demonstrations of stewardship. Their sensory, relational practices invite us to heighten awareness of our responsibilities within the living cosmos.

Locus of Voices embraces immediacy and impermanence as generative actions — vibrational exchanges that sustain environmental bodies. This extends into a deeper inquiry of reciprocity: How may our movements and correspondences with the elements cultivate ecological awareness — akin to a chorus of relation, grounded in our shared ecology?

Engaged in this dialogue are artists: Milford Graves/ Jake Messina Meginsky, Emmanuel Awuni, Naima Nefertari/Cõvco E. Kikaya, Kalpana Arias, Phoebe Collings-James, Anonymous Monastic, SERAFINE1369, Divine Southgate-Smith, Rosalind Nashashibi and Raven Chacon.

This exhibition engages somatic disciplines that invoke the wisdom of ancestral bodies; animistic philosophies that recognise sentience within matter, collapsing the divide between subject and object; experiential abstraction, where compassion arises through perception and felt experience; and spiritual neuroaesthetics, which explore how aesthetic experiences activate the nervous system, initiating resonance across emotional, cognitive, and sensory dimensions, awakening memory and intuition.

Acknowledging histories of desensitisation and violence, Locus of Voices transmits practices of listening and care shaped by relational, reciprocal, and intersectional ways of being.

Curated by Nissa Nishikawa

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Artist Biographies 

Milford Graves:

Milford Graves (August 20, 1941 - February 12, 2021, Jamaica, Queens) was a percussionist, acupuncturist, herbalist, martial artist, programmer, and professor. A pioneer of free Jazz, Graves was a member of the New York Art Quartet, whose iconic first recording in 1964 featured LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) reading his poem "Black Dada Nihilismus." In 1967, he played at John Coltrane's funeral. A consummate autodidact with a syncretic approach, Graves invented a martial art form called Yara based on the movements of the Praying Mantis, African ritual dance, and Lindy Hop in 1972. Shortly thereafter, Graves joined the Black Music Division at Bennington College, where he taught for 39 years and became Professor Emeritus. In 2000 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and began to study human heart vibrations to better understand music's healing potential, and in 2015 he received the Doris Duke Foundation Impact Award. He was the subject of a critically acclaimed, feature-length documentary, Milford Graves Full Mantis (2018), directed by his former student, Jake Meginsky. Additional notable recordings included In Concert At Yale University(with Don Pullen, 1966); Dialogue of the Drums (with Andrew Cyrille, 1974); Babi (1977); Meditation Among Us(1977); Real Deal (with David Murray, 1992); Grand Unification (1998); Beyond Quantum (with Anthony Braxton and William Parker, 2008); and Space/Time Redemption (with Bill Laswell, 2014). He lived and worked in South Jamaica, Queens in the home that formerly belonged to his grandmother.

Jake Meginsky: 

Jake Meginsky's work crosses boundaries between experimental music, film, and dance. A recipient of the New Music USA grant and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships in both music and film, Meginsky has collaborated with a remarkable range of artists including Milford Graves, Alvin Lucier, Joan La Barbara, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and William Parker.

His music has been praised by leading publications, with Artforum noting his ability to "build rhythmic worlds of dizzying density, depth, and textural variety." His solo releases have earned critical acclaim, including his debut L'appel Du Vide being included in WIRE Magazine's Top 10 Records of the Year for Outer Limits and his third release, Seven Psychotropic Sinewave Palindromes, was listed in FACT Magazine’s Top 50 Albums of 2016.

In 2018, Meginsky directed and produced the award-winning documentary Milford Graves Full Mantis, described by The New York Tiumes as a "stunning documentary" that "gives you the man's heart." The film received national and international distribution and was featured at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture's inaugural film festival.

Meginsky maintains deep connections to the dance world, collaborating with choreographers including Angie Hauser, Cori Olinghouse, Gwen Welliver, and Nora Chipaumire. He received a New Music USA Live Music for Dance recognition for his composition for Welliver's Beasts and Plots, which premiered at New York Live Arts and was later restaged at the Guggenheim. He is presently collaborating with Kendra Portier on a new work to premiere in 2026. 

His recordings appear on numerous labels including Open Mouth, Poole NNA, Mantile, and Matador Records and his films are distributed by the Criterion Collection. 

Emmanuel Awuni: 

Emmanuel Awuni’s work is grounded in rhythm, diasporic heritage, and the reimagining of cultural and architectural hierarchies. Awuni completed his undergraduate studies in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London (2017) and later earned an MA from the Royal Academy of Arts (2022). These academic experiences shaped his interdisciplinary approach, which spans painting, sculpture, performance, and sound.

Awuni’s work draws deeply on African oral traditions, including hip-hop, jazz, reggae, and Afrobeats, which he employs as frameworks to examine power dynamics, cultural resilience, and displacement. Music serves as both a source of inspiration and a metaphor for cultural expression in his work, embodying rhythm and emotional resonance that mirror the call-and-response structures found in African and diasporic traditions. 

Speaking on the intersection of these influences, he once remarked, ‘How can I make the work look like music? How can I make something visual feel like music?’ (Black Discourse). This aspiration underlines his efforts to translate music’s structural and emotive qualities into the visual and spatial domains of his art.

Naima Nefertari : 

Naima Nefertari (aka Karlsson) is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and composer based in London. Her practice interweaves sonic and visual forms led by interests in repetition, improvisation, and the relationships between language, image, symbol, and sound. Nefertari’s main instrument is the piano, as well as percussion, vibraphone, and electric organ.

• Improvisation is at the core of the artist’s musical process, combined with minimalist uses of tone and an inherently organic approach to playing —  calling on the concept of ‘Organic Music’ proposed independently by two major influences: composer Julius Eastman (1940-1990) and her grandfather the jazz musician Don Cherry (1936-1995).

Nefertari is part of the duo Exotic Sin with Japanese multi-instrumentalist Kenichi Iwasa, and she is an NTS radio resident with her show 'Fragrant Sacrifice'. As an archivist and coordinator for the Estate of Moki Cherry and Cherry Archives, Nefertari has studied piano in the tradition of her grandfather Don Cherry, with her uncles Eagle-Eye and David Ornette Cherry, with Mexican pianist and improviser Ana Ruíz. 

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Cõvco E. Kikaya/Infinite FXX:

Initiated by Cõvco E. Kikaya, Infinite FXX is a nomadic experimental channel for the arts. Moving between contemporary expression and reimagined traditional theatrics, it is rooted in alternative inner-city realities.

The platform is formed through the compilation Ultra Blessed, the sonic assembly XSPIRIT, and the forthcoming performance night Union Salon — each a node in an evolving live archive.

Its debut release brought together 20+ collaborators carving their own lanes in sound, including Petie Noir, Prince Kongo, Oko Ebombo, Words of Azia, Crystallmess, Chino Amobi, Lord Tusk, Rat Section, and more — in support of Project Kinshasa, an initiative to build an art residency in Kongo, Kinshasa.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/building-an-art-residency-in-congo-continetal-programmes

Kalpana Arias: 

Kalpana Arias is a guerrilla gardener, technologist, nature rights activist and food grower, writer, speaker and the founder of Nowadays, a social enterprise fighting for urban nature. Alongside Nowadays, Arias campaigns for the right to grow and nature rights through urban gardening projects and tech policy reforms.

Arias has been researching technological ecologies for over 7 years, delivered a global TED talk, spoken at the United Nations, featured on Evening Standard's ‘30 under 30 list of Climate Activists On A Mission To Save London’ and Vogue. She also serves as a trustee for GROW charity and National Park City. Arias is currently an environmental consultant for corporations and governments and works with leading charities, institutions, brands and grassroots change-makers.

Phoebe Collings-James:

Phoebe Collings-James’ works function as ‘emotional detritus’; speaking of knowledges of feelings, the debris of violence, language, and desire which are inherent to living and surviving within hostile environments. Her work spans across sculpture, sound, performance and installation, and unpacks the object as subject by giving life and tension to ceramic forms.

Colling-James’ musical alias, young nettle, creates sound design for original music productions and is a member of B.O.S.S., a QTIBIPOC sound system based in South London.

They also run Mudbelly, a ceramics studio, shop and teaching facility offering free ceramics courses for Black people in London, taught by Black ceramicists.

Recent solo exhibitions include: In Practice, SculptureCenter, New York, US (2024); bun babylon; a heretics anthology, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2023); A Scratch! A Scratch!, Camden Art Centre, London, UK (2021); Relative Strength, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2018), Expensive Shit, 315 Gallery, New York, US (2017), ATROPHILIA (with Jesse Darling) and Company, New York, UK (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Self Made: Reshaping Identities, Foundling Museum, London, UK (2024); Conversations, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2024); In and Out of Place. Land after Information 1992-2024, Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, DE (2024); Oh téléphone, oracle noir (…), Le Magasin CNAC, Grenoble, FR (2023); Phantom Sculpture, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, UK (2023); Unearthing: Memory, Land, Materiality, The Courtauld Gallery, London, UK (2023); Body Vessel Clay, Two Temple Place, London (2022); York Art Gallery, York (2022); Produktive Bildstörung. Sigmar Polke und aktuelle künstlerische Positionen, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf (2021); You Feel Me, FACT Liverpool, Liverpool (2019), In Whose Eyes, Beaconsfield Gallery, London (2018), Okey Dokey, Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf (2017) and Bust Wide Open, Harlem Postcards, Studio Museum Harlem (2017). 

Collings-James’ works are in major public collections including: Arts Council  England, London (UK); Kadist Foundation, Paris (FR); York Art Gallery, York (UK); Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton (UK). Performances and screenings include: Getty Museum, LA (2019), Sonic Acts, Amsterdam (2019), Café Oto, London (2019) and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018).

Anonymous Monastic:

The anonymous artists are likely the Vajrayana tradition monastics from Tibet and Mongolia. Their collective identity is rooted in devotional practice and ritual precision, reflecting a deep understanding of sacred aesthetics.

Private collection of Socrates T. Mitsos & Zoe Paul.

SERAFINE1369:

SERAFINE1369 is a dancer, artist, and body-focused researcher working with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology. They work with/in the context of the hostile architectures of the metropolis towards moments and states of transcendence and transmutation. Dancing is a kind of ghost work, a work of cycles and fragmentary returns that speaks to meditative, divinatory and devotional practices. 

Busy with propositions and practices — of dancing, spatial arrangement, and modes of receiving — that counter the tendency towards bodily compression, inflammation, and alienation, their practice is concerned with the integrity and efficacy of structures (bodily and social). This approach acknowledges the cosmic oneness of all things as manifested through the ecologies of relation and the fact that everything is made of the same stuff, whilst being intensely curious about the magic and mysteries of life processes of distinction, variation, cycles, and decomposition; the inevitability of movement as it transforms and sustains. Cumulative and cyclical, their practice involves a continual re-synthesising of their own archive materially and thematically, addressing non-linear time, unsettling internalised hierarchies, and oracular practice. 

SERAFINE1369 works with collaboration, hosting, and an interest in somatics, semiotics, and symbiotics from a body-led, experiential position. Their work prioritises listening and is responsive to the specificities of context. This work is underpinned by their interest in the invisible systems and structures that choreograph bodies in life.

Divine Southgate-Smith:

Divine Southgate-Smith’s approach to art making is medium, non-specific, and collaborative. This is reflected through a trans-disciplinary practice that comprises photographic collage, sculpture, moving-image, text, poetry, and 3D animation. Central to this approach is a meticulous focus on selecting, ordering, and assembling archival material. 

Southgate-Smith invites us to consider archives as temporal instruments essential to envisioning a future deeply connected to the past. Their work evokes an Afro-diasporic counter-memory blending personal, literary, folkloric, and historical narratives to create layered, speculative spaces that map histories beyond prescribed contexts. 

Rosalind Nashashibi: 

Rosalind Nashashibi is a London-based artist of Palestinian and Northern Irish descent. She makes paintings and films shot on 16mm, which often feature paintings. Nashashibi is preoccupied with looking to an extent that gets weird, and almost crosses over into the other camp. Her films are punctuated by manifestations of power dynamics and collectives, whilst chronicling intimate moments of life. In her painting she uses themes and motifs that court awkwardness and pleasure, whether in direct relation to historical paintings or in strange and candid subject matter. 

Nashashibi received her BA in Painting from Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield (UK), and her MFA at Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (UK). In 2020, Nashashibi was artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in London (UK). She was a Turner Prize nominee in 2017 and represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennale. Her work has been included in Documenta 14, The 14th Shanghai Biennale, Manifesta 7, The Nordic Triennial, and Sharjah 10. Nashashibi received a Paul Hamlyn Award in 2014 and Becks Futures Award in 2003. Her solo exhibitions include; Nottingham Contemporary (UK); Musée Art Contemporain Carré d’Art, Nîmes (FR), Radvila Palace Museum of Art for CAC, Vilnius (LT), Vienna Secession, (A), Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, (NL), The High Line, New York, (US); The Art Institute of Chicago, (US); and ICA, London (UK). 

Raven Chacon: 

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile-long land art installation Repellent Fence.

A recording artist over the span of 24 years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.

Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.

His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.