Performances taking place at Proposition Bethnal Green

Additional performance 9 August 2025, 3 - 4pm

Limited spaces. RSVP essential

Please email rsvp@propositionstudios.com

There is so much stuff that is here already - corporeal, ideological, energetic stuff. So many years of time past, such a breadth of time present that it can feel absurd to be making yet another thing.

I think of my ‘self’ as a reorganisation of stuff that was already here. Call it growth. My body, my thoughts, the atmosphere in the room…a rearrangement of fragments.

I think about embodiment as a state of possession - hosting, haunted. Not in the way of a spirit trapped in flesh or a ghost operating a machine but in the sense of being the physical mouthpiece of many beings. Each existing on varying timelines. Body as chorus.

Engaging in automatic dancing is a process that I believe can allow many of these voices to speak (and be heard) at once. I also invite you to join the constellation and to speak through my body. Both an intimate and mundane invitation to listen back to these multiple voices, to hear the chorus to receive what it (we, I) may propose as some kind of oracular reading. 

Concept & Performance SERAFINE1369 / Sound Score Vivienne Griffin & Billy Easter 

This work has been developed with support from performance, possession + automation, a three-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

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.

Join us at our new site on 279 Cambridge Heath Road for our first ever Open Studios at Bethnal Green, an exciting opportunity to meet our studio artists, find out more about their work, and learn about their processes of creation.

From painting and sculpture, jewellery and performance, to textiles and photography, get ready to be inspired by our community!

You’ll also be able to enjoy our current exhibition, LOCUS OF VOICES, taking place in the galleries.

This event is FREE and open to the public. Tickets HERE

Step-free access available for the exhibition and there is an accessible toilet. However the studio floors are only accessible by stairs.

Alcoholic and soft drinks will be available to purchase.

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

Sign up to our mailing list to keep in the loop about our events, programming and studio vacancies!

PLEASE NOTE THE DATE OF THIS EVENT HAS CHANGED TO SEPTEMBER

FREE with limited spaces: rsvp@propositionstudios.com

This lecture is a blend of talk and direct experience. We’ll explore how trance and hypnosis have been used across cultures and history—from ancient rituals to modern therapy—to shift perception, ease suffering, and open up new creative ways of experiencing the self.

We'll look at key techniques used to guide people into these altered states and explore what might actually be happening in the mind and body during hypnosis.

You’ll be guided through a series of hypnotic exercises—giving you a direct taste of how attention, imagination, and suggestion can significantly alter your awareness and bring about the kinds of inner states we call trance.

This is a chance to learn about hypnosis not just in theory, but through your own embodied experience in a safe, engaging, and supportive setting.

No previous knowledge of hypnosis is needed. 

www.micheleoccelli.com

featuring Cõvco - Richard Olatunde - Ines Di Folco - Fat Lip ++

& Naima Nefertari b2b Paul Camo 

Infinite FXX: Ultra Blessed playback 

Tickets £8 - £10

Get your tickets here

Throughout the exhibition, LOCUS OF VOICES, Gallery III will act as a collective space for music and gatherings. With a grand piano activated by artist/musician Naima Nefertari in collaboration with Infinite FXX founder Cõvco E. Kikaya in three acts.

All ticket proceeds go to Infinite FXX Project Kinshasa (Art Residency in Congo).

Cõvco is a London-based Congolese polymath artist whose practice spans music, performance, poetry, and curation. Known for her experimental soundscapes and emotionally raw performances, she creates immersive experiences that move between club spaces, ritual, and live art. Her sonic work ranges from live performance to scoring, often weaving voice, movement, and texture into boundary-pushing compositions. Founder of Infinite FXX, a nomadic cultural platform and Multi performance Channel grounded in radical storytelling, diasporic connection, and new ways of gathering. Through Infinite FXX and a wider curatorial work, including a collaborative album ‘Ultra Blessed’featuring over 24 international artists in support of the PROJECT KINSHASA, an initiative to build an art residency and provide cross continental programmes. Cõvco cultivates spaces for new forms of expression and intergenerational exchange.

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 relationships between language, image, symbol and sound. Naima’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.

Solo piano and duo performance

Infinite FXX: Ultra Blessed playback 

+Solstice polyphony in an embryonic state.

++ Scales and teachings from Dr Yusef Lateef

5pm - Infinite FXX: Ultra Blessed album playback & drinks 

6pm - Performance

8pm - End 

Tickets £8 - £10

Book your tickets here: https://ra.co/events/2185323

All ticket proceeds go to Infinite FXX Project Kinshasa (Art Residency in Congo).

Throughout the exhibition, LOCUS OF VOICES, Gallery III will act as a collective space for music and gatherings. With a grand piano activated by artist/musician Naima Nefertari in collaboration with Infinite FXX founder Cõvco E. Kikaya in three acts.

Infinite FXX is a nomadic cultural platform and Multi performance Channel grounded in radical storytelling, diasporic connection, and new ways of gathering. Through Infinite FXX and a wider curatorial work, including a collaborative album ‘Ultra Blessed’ featuring over 24 international artists in support of the PROJECT KINSHASA, an initiative to build an art residency and provide cross continental programmes. Infinite FXX gofundme: https://gofund.me/c40a10cb

Other acts in the series: -

ACT II - XSPIRIT QUARTET - SUNDAY 6TH JULY 6-9PM

featuring Cõvco - Richard Olatunde - Ines Di Folco - Fat Lip ++

& Naima Nefertari b2b Paul Camo 

ACT III - SONIC GATHERING - SATURDAY 2ND AUGUST 3PM 

Open Piano, Improvisations, Milford Graves listening & food

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 relationships between language, image, symbol and sound. Naima’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.

Cõvco is a London-based Congolese polymath artist whose practice spans music, performance, poetry, and curation. Known for her experimental soundscapes and emotionally raw performances, she creates immersive experiences that move between club spaces, ritual, and live art. Her sonic work ranges from live performance to scoring, often weaving voice, movement, and texture into boundary-pushing compositions. She is the founder of Infinite FXX.

Join us for the Private View of Locus of Voices.

• Thursday 19 June at 6.30pm - 8.30pm

• RSVP: rsvp@propositionstudios.com

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

• Toilets on 1st floor with no wheelchair access.

In a time of escalating crisis, Propositions forthcoming exhibition 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 Meginsky, Naima Nefertari/Cõvco E. Kikaya, Emmanuel Awuni, Kalpana Arias, Phoebe Collings-James, Anonymous Monastic, SERAFINE1369, Divine Southgate-Smith, Rosalind Nashashibi, and Raven Chacon.

Curated by Nissa Nishikawa.

Find out more about this exhibition and the artists here

Sunday 1st June 2025

11.00 am - 7.00 pm

Free Entry // All Welcome

Address: 279 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, E2 0EL

Please note: Toilets on 1st floor with no wheelchair access.

About this Event

POP UP SHOP.

Fantastic Toiles is a space where you will find experiments, toiles, works of art and everything in between.

An independently run space by designer/makers and artists.

A space for artists to show and sell work without the constraints and prescribed ideals of a homogenised corporate industry.

Almost all items are 1 of 1 and handmade. Materials and fabrics used are often repurposed, discarded and antique. 

Natural imperfections are expected and sometimes occur in the process of one off works.

https://www.fantastictoiles.co.uk/ // @fantastictoiles

This is a free event and part of our Pansentient Arboriculture exhibition.

#PansentientArboriculture

You are invited to an artist-led guided tour of our current exhibition, Pansentient Arboriculture, on Tuesday 20th of May. 

Sol Bailey Barker will take visitors around the show, talk about the individual sculptures, the trees from which they are created, and explore their folklore roles within ecology. 

Drinks will be served, conversation will be welcome, and there will be informal Q&A throughout the tour. 

• 6.30pm - 7.30pm at Proposition Bethnal Green

• 279 Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 0EL 

• This event is free

Please note: Toilets are on the first floor with no wheelchair access.

About the Exhibition

Proposition is pleased to present Pansentient Arboriculture, a new solo exhibition by artist Sol Bailey Barker which proposes a system of care in which trees and entire forests are considered sentient and aware, having a form of consciousness. This exhibition decodes our relationship with the arboreal world, considering practices such as agroforestry, ecological preservation, and the cultural and spiritual roles of trees. Drawing on the folklore of Albion, Pansentient Arboriculture builds a bridge to the world our ancestors lived in, extending from their knowledge.

Find out more about the exhibition and the artist here

This free exhibition will run from Friday 25th April to Saturday 7th June 2025.

www.solbaileybarker.com // @solbaileybarker

#PansentientArboriculture

Free Entry // All Welcome

Spaces are limited to 25, book your place here

Address: 279 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, E2 0EL

Please note: Toilets on 1st floor with no wheelchair access.

About this Event

Qi Gong is an ancient Chinese energy movement practice, it is available and accessible to all abilities and bodies. During this event we will explore themes, elements and concepts of Qi Gong as the seasons unfold.

Cultivating the soft strength and playful movements that are at the core of Qi Gong’s health benefits, for longevity and a balanced life. Accompanied by a live soundscape by bones and various ambient musicians over the months, practitioners will be fully immersed in the sonic sounds as they move intentionally through this energy practice. Moving somatically, bones guides students into a poetic relationship to their bodies and the space and world around them.

About the Artist

bones tan jones (b.93 Liverpool) is a queer heretic whose work traverses materials, disciplines and time lines.

Raised in a church choir in the northwest of the UK, on the borderlands of mythical Wales and enchanted England, Tan Jones’s work has ne'er strayed far from the ecclesiastic rituals of worship, only in tan jones’s world, the church has been burnt, the yew trees thrive in the ashes, and god is trans.

bones tan jones presents their living praxis ‘optimystic dystopia’ as a spiritual practice. an eternal storyteller, alternative realities are explored through alter egos, retellings of ancient Chinese and Celtic mythologies through creating; symphonies, operas, psalms, triptychs, sigils, stele, installations, interventions, inter-active workshops.

https://bonestanjones.world/ // @bonestanjones

This is a free event and part of our Pansentient Arboriculture exhibition.

#PansentientArboriculture

We are thrilled to invite you to celebrate our inaugural exhibition, Pansentient Arboriculture, at Proposition Bethnal Green — a moment that marks the official public opening of our new cultural hub. Join us for a first look at this exceptional work, to connect and celebrate the beginning of an ambitious new chapter in our story, programme and community.

To join us at this event: rsvp@propositionstudios.com

Address: 279 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, E2 0EL

Please note: Toilets on 1st floor with no wheelchair access.

About the Exhibition

Pansentient Arboriculture, a new solo exhibition by artist Sol Bailey Barker, which proposes a system of care in which trees and entire forests are considered sentient and aware — possessing a form of consciousness.

This exhibition decodes our relationship with the arboreal world, considering practices such as agroforestry, ecological preservation, and the cultural and spiritual roles of trees. Drawing on the folklore of Albion, Pansentient Arboriculture builds a bridge to the world our ancestors lived in, extending from their knowledge.

Find out more about the exhibition and the artist here

This free exhibition will run from Friday 25th April to Saturday 7th June 2025.

www.solbaileybarker.com // @solbaileybarker

#PansentientArboriculture

We are excited to announce the unveiling of our commissioned artworks, taking place at Proposition on Wednesday 19 June 2024, 6.30 - 8.30pm. These works explore the concept of the Biodiversity Fingerprint, and the event will involve a curator’s welcome at 7pm, followed by an introduction to the artists, a short film screening, and the opportunity to hear our ‘Proposition’.

Join us, and RSVP by emailing rsvp@propositionstudios.com!