Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
Individual experience separated by physical boundaries (of space, time or ability) suggested as communities of collective experience by (perhaps voyeuristic) artists.
Ecstatic, intensely joyous experimental club music: like “the sound of our water ceremonies…40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the call of the morning star Venus”.
What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene going on in Harlem had travelled downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
Part old-fashioned Renaissance man, part hardcore avant-gardist, the Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in the exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, named after the ‘central region’ of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain’s two hemispheres.
Wave Formations is a 5 screen work in which each screen runs through a series of fades and then stroboscopic flashes of colour, to create a series of visual harmonics.
Ex Ganger guitarist’s solo performance for guitar and fx, featuring breathless processed guitar, complex in structure and melody.
Sachiko’s very simple, pure sine tones and structures. Otomo on double pianos. Filament’s music isn’t composed and it isn’t improvised: it’s a hybrid of the two.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
The club as a community and a site for performed politics: deep/ queer house, vogue femme, lipsync and ballroom.
Dual projections of pulsating shards of film, treated in crystallized salts and dyes merge with the whirring of projectors, distilled into particles of sound.
