Touching the Imperceptible
Arthur Jafa Kara Keeling
A performed filmic conversation on queer and black world making.
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.
A performed filmic conversation on queer and black world making.
As opposed to suggesting soundtrack’s to Brakhage’s works [which are almost entirely silent] Text of Light use his works to stimulate improvisation, enveloping them into the structure of the group much like an additional musician.
We wanted to ask a bunch of the best high-energy-improvisers around; can musical form really taking shape via a group energy? Can individual concentration lead to a group consciousness?
A workshop inviting participants to enact a series of scores that explore witnessing, testimony, grief and mourning, facilitated by Mezna and Sadia, and accompanied by Sakina Ali.
The final iteration of Arika’s INSTAL festivals, the 2010 edition was an experimental festival of experimental music – 3 days of events at the Tramway that explored un-average ideas about sound and music.
A black hole of dense heaviosity, full of slow motion riffage, tectonic pummel and massive planet destroying rock.
‘Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations’ for piano, an impossible score that looks like a grapeshot musical stave, a text of barbed loathing and doubt – an anti-composition.
A sung-through Nubian musical ballet. A darkly humorous take on sexual trauma and what magical and ancestral tools might heal it.
Black Boned Angel’s is a rock sound, stripped of all extraneous detail right down to its core, stretched out and nailed to the ceiling.
Goofily deformed, deeply thought vocal jams: like the sound of your own breath rushing through your head.
One of the great experimental films. A 60 minute, three part riddle that maybe approximates our intellectual development by moving from imageless words to the recognition of silent images and the learning of simple tasks and finally a serenity and acceptance of death.
Imagery, drawn from what seems like hundreds of different films is overlaid and combined in a promissory rainbow of new meanings and impossible scenarios, with the unsettling feel of daylight shadows.