About the Exhibition

In a time of escalating planetary crisis, Locus of Voices offers a vision for resilience and renewal — frameworks and calls to move with resonant systems that create ecological abundance. 

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 our 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 might our movements and correspondences with the elements cultivate ecological awareness — akin to a chorus of relationships, grounded in our shared ecology?

Engaged in this dialogue are artists: Milford Graves / Jake 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 disconnection, Locus of Voices transmits practices of listening and care, shaped by relational, reciprocal, and intersectional ways of being. It is co-operation and symbiosis between diverse beings that sustain life and enable it to flourish. 

This gathering speaks to ecological consciousness as both a cultural and spiritual imperative — a call to attune to and nurture the worlds we inhabit. 

Curated by Nissa Nishikawa.

LOCUS OF VOICES will be exhibited throughout the galleries, lecture hall, and garden in Proposition Bethnal Green, from Friday 20th June to Sunday 17th August.

Visit the Exhibition

• Open Wednesday - Saturday, 12pm - 7pm

• Closed Sundays except for Sunday 17th August for a final gathering

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

• Private view: Thursday 19th June at 6.30pm - 8.30pm. RSVP: rsvp@propositionstudios.com

• Toilets on 1st floor with no wheelchair access

Artist Biographies

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'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 Times 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’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 (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. 

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 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’ 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 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’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 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 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.