London photographer and filmmaker Gabriel Moses, who has worked with musicians including Travis Scott, Skepta, Little Simz and Pa Salieu, will hold his largest ever exhibition at 180 Studios from 28 March to 27 July 2025. Tickets are on sale now from the 180 Studios website.

Selah brings together over 70 photographs and 10 films showcasing his work across the worlds of fashion, music, and sport throughout his career, including films and music videos such as Fein by Travis Scott and Playboi Carti, Lost Times by Schoolboy Q, and portraits of Slawn, Skepta, Alek Wek, Jude Bellingham and more.

Taking over two floors of 180 Studios, Selah also features new work from Moses, including an exclusive new series of photographs and the premiere of a new short film, The Last Hour. The acted-out short film was shot in Atlanta, Georgia, and follows one man’s journey to finding solace in solitude whilst in pursuit of redemption. The film was commissioned by 180 Studios and executive produced by Division and Goat.  

Born in South London, Moses’ practice is deeply rooted in his British-Nigerian heritage. Characterised by a rich colour palette and minimal contextual detail, he produces emotive, soulful images which reflect on personal history, cultural signifiers, and memory. His work is often a tribute to the women who have shaped him, especially his grandmother, mother, and sister, who introduced him to art and fashion.  

Moses possesses a unique photographic eye that has captured the attention of both the fashion and music worlds. In the short time since he stepped onto the scene, he has gathered an outstanding body of work, collaborating with an extensive list of brands and artists including Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Dior, Nike, Vogue, i-D, Pharrell Williams, Zinedine Zidane, Skepta and Travis Scott, amongst others.

In 2024 Moses released his first monograph, Regina, published by Prestel, and was named as the trophy designer of 2025 The BRIT Award. In 2023 he held his debut solo exhibition at 180 Studios, London and has exhibited at Anthony Gallery, Chicago (2024), Spazio Maiocchi, Milan (2024), Permanent, Paris (2024), Frieze Seoul, Korea (2024), WSA, New York City (2024), and Luma Foundation, Arles (2025). 

Selah is curated by Katja Horvat in collaboration with 180 Studios, with spatial design by Emilia Margulies and graphic identity designed by Jayda Deans. 

Gabriel Moses: Selah
180 Studios
28 March 2025 – 27 July 2025
Wednesday– Sunday, 12pm – 7pm

Tickets are available from the 180 Studios website

The post Gabriel Moses announces largest ever exhibition at 180 Studios appeared first on Fact Magazine.

In a new interview, Argentinian artist, choreographer, and dancer Cecilia Bengolea details the experience of making Shelly Belly Inna Real Life, her video installation for The Vinyl Factory: Reverb exhibition.

Exploring the world of dancehall – a genre and form of dance originating in Jamaica – Bengolea’s Shelly Belly Inna Real Life grants an intimate view of the communities and individuals that keep the scene going. Accompanying dancehall icon Shelly Belly, Bengolea explores the choreography and social context of dancehall’s participants and the wider culture around them.

In this interview, Bengolea discusses her connection with dancehall, the relationship between the Jamaican police and dance and the wider world of street dance.

Shelly Belly Inna Real Life isn’t Bengolea’s first brush with Shelly Belly or The Vinyl Factory. In 2016, Bengolea and her collaborative partner Jeremy Deller teamed up with The Vinyl Factory to create Bom Bom’s Dream for The Infinite Mix exhibition.

Following the adventures of a Japanese dancer known as Bom Bom, Bom Bom’s Dream similarly engaged the dancehall and featured Shelly Belly in a starring role.

Watch the video above and book tickets for the exhibition at the 180 Studios website.

The Vinyl Factory: Reverb

180 Studios
180 The Strand, London, WC2R 1EA
22 May, 2024 – 2 March, 2025
Exhibition closed between December 23, 2024 and 8 January, 2025

Wednesday – Saturday: 12pm to 7pm
Sunday: 12pm to 6pm

Watch next: Es Devlin: Screenshare

This post was originally published on The Vinyl Factory

The post Interview: Cecilia Bengolea on her dancehall film for VF: Reverb appeared first on Fact Magazine.

One of the most popular exhibitions ever staged at 180 Studios, The Vinyl Factory: Reverb, is being extended due to popular demand until 2 March, 2025. Tickets are available now from the 180 Studios website.

Devon Turnbull, Caterina Barbieri, Jeremy Deller, Carsten Nicolai and Virgil Abloh all feature as part of the exhibition, which showcases the breadth of The Vinyl Factory’s commissions and collaborations over the past 20 years, including site-specific audio-visual installations and sonic experiences from artists including Theaster Gates, Es Devlin and Julianknxx.

REVERB also features UK premieres of artworks by Kahlil Joseph, Stan Douglas and Cecilia Bengolea, as well as installations by William Kentridge, Jenn Nkiru, Hito Steyerl and Gabriel Moses.

100 vinyl records created by artists and released by The Vinyl Factory are also on display in a new space designed by Ben Kelly. These include releases by Nan Goldin, Arthur Jafa, Pipilotti Rist, William Kentridge, Mica Levi, Marina Abramovic, Grace Jones, Yussef Dayes, Es Devlin, Fred Again, Thom Yorke, Ragnar Kjartansson, Massive Attack, Pet Shop Boys, Maurizio Cattelan, Daft Punk, The xx, Rachel Rose, Kojey Radical, Taryn Simon and more.

Hi-Fi Listening Room Dream No.1, created by and programmed with New York artist Devon Turnbull, creates a meditative space within the exhibition to listen to vinyl with an evolving programme of unheard music, including exclusive test pressings and studio outtakes. 

Over the course of the exhibition so far, Hi-Fi Listening Room Dream No.1 has hosted listening sessions with artists and selectors such as Haseeb Iqbal and Charlie Dark.

A new work by Theaster Gates, Amplified, exists as a sonic installation inside Reverb during the day and transforms into a space that hosts live performances at night, with shows recorded and pressed direct-to-disc on The Vinyl Factory Lathe. 

Amplified has hosted musical performances and conversations curated by The Vinyl Factory in partnership with creative studio Alaska Alaska and art bookshop Reference Point, featuring shows by musicians including Ragz Originale, Jamilah Barry, Hendrix Harris, Caleb Femi, Kokoroko and Fabiana Palladino.

Entry to these intimate performances is strictly invite only. For a chance to win tickets to upcoming Amplified sessions, follow 180 Studios on Instagram and keep an eye out for future giveaways.

Tickets for REVERB are on sale now.

180 Studios
180 The Strand, London, WC2R 1EA
22 May, 2024 – 2 March, 2025
Exhibition closed between December 23, 2024 and 8 January, 2025

Wednesday – Saturday: 12pm to 7pm
Sunday: 12pm to 6pm

Watch next: Es Devlin: Screenshare

The post The Vinyl Factory: Reverb exhibition extended until 2 March appeared first on Fact Magazine.

In Screenshare, a new commission by The Vinyl Factory and 180 Studios, artist and stage designer Es Devlin assembles a cinema screen from recreations of her sketchbooks. Now showing at The Vinyl Factory: Reverb exhibition at 180 Studios, Screenshare invites visitors to sit and watch a short film and then take a page of the screen away with them, an idea that Devlin goes into detail on in the film above.

“The sketches have been made over the past 35 years: some are drawings of London species, some drawings of my kids, lots of process drawings, traces of me trying to work out ideas or share them with collaborators,” Devlin says of the process that went into creating Screenshare.

“The film is an anthology drawn from installation works made over the past 16 years and the soundtrack is an extract from the Vinyl Factory record we made with Polyphonia last year, An Atlas of Es Devlin.

Es Devlin first collaborated with The Vinyl Factory to stage a new commission, BlueSkyWhite, which was part of the LUX exhibition, which took place at 180 Studios in 2021.

The Vinyl Factory: Reverb runs until March 2, 2025, and features 17 audio-visual experiences and installations celebrating the intersection of art and sound. Reverb also includes works from Carsten Nicolai, Caterina Barbieri, Stan Douglas, Jeremy Deller and Cecilia Bengolea, alongside Devon Turnbull’s HiFi Listening Room Dream No 1, a space inside the exhibition where visitors can listen to vinyl on a handmade, high-performance soundsystem.

Buy tickets to The Vinyl Factory: Reverb at 180 Studios now.

180 Studios
180 The Strand, London, WC2R 1EA
22 May, 2024 – 2 March, 2025

10am – 7pm, Wednesday – Sunday

Read next: Interview: Devon Turnbull

The post Es Devlin: Screenshare appeared first on Fact Magazine.

Jeremy Deller has interrogated and framed art, music and politics through his work as a producer, publisher, filmmaker, collaborator and archivist for the last three decades. The London-born Turner Prize-winning conceptual artist has explored everything from brass bands (Acid Brass) and Depeche Mode (Our Hobby is Depeche Mode) to the Miners’ strike (The Battle of Orgreave) and the Iraq War (It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq).

The Vinyl Factory has a long history of collaboration with Deller to create a multitude of music and art projects, from his 2013 Venice Biennale soundtrack which VF produced and recorded at Abbey Road to the co-commissioning of his film Bom Bom’s Dream which was shown at The Infinite Mix, co-presented by VF at 180 Studios in 2016. Over the years, Deller has released numerous records with VF including English Magic, his cover of ‘Voodoo Ray‘, and collaborations with Adrian Sherwood and Cecelia Bengolea.

The Vinyl Factory: Reverb exhibition showcases VF’s many artistic collaborations with artists we’ve regularly worked with including Deller. In his installation for the exhibition, Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992, Deller once again dives into the world of music; this time examining the socio-political history of the ‘Second Summer of Love’. A film of a lecture Deller delivered to a class of A-level Politics students, the piece combines rare archive footage with an oral history tracing house music from its Chicago and Detroit origins to its political presence in post-Miners’ strike Britain.

We speak with Deller about the importance of rave history, the students’ response and the relationship between art and popular music.

This interview was originally published on The Vinyl Factory

How did the lecture come about?

I’d given a talk in a school in a North London state school–just a regular artist talk and I was slightly wary. I’d never given a talk to a group of teenagers, but I got such a great feeling from it. It’s funny when you do talks, you know if your audience is with you or against you or they’re engaged. These young people were engaged and asked funny questions. It was a laugh. 

When I was asked to make a documentary about ‘80s music, I thought, “Okay, I’m going to go back to that school because I liked being with those young people. I’m going to do a film giving a lecture about my view of music and society in the 1980s, and how dance music pushed society forward and changed society.” 

How did the students respond? 

A lot of them were politics students but that doesn’t mean they study contemporary history. Also, I think for most of the students in the film, their parents were not born in the UK, so their parents had no experience of growing up in Britain in the ‘80s and ‘90s and there was no folk or familial memory of Britain at that time. Those students were looking at this footage and some of these ideas for the first time.

Their reactions are very visceral and immediate to things like the miners’ strike, the Traveller movement, or even just footage of raves. They were intrigued and puzzled by things and, in a sense, I was trying to show them a version of Britain they might not be aware of just because they weren’t aware of the history, but also the complexity and the surprising nature of certain aspects of British society and youth movements.

What was your approach to research for the lecture?

When you are researching something like this, you do some from memory and read books. I went online and found a clip which is in the film that I didn’t own before I thought about making the film. It was a group of dancers in Detroit dancing to Kraftwerk which, for me, is one of the most joyful incredible pieces of footage you could ever see. 

It’s such a revealing piece of footage. People dressed up all looking like they were going to a wedding or something, dancing their hearts out to Kraftwerk. It’s the most incredible thing. I knew I wanted to use that–whatever happened, I would use that clip. Then, of course, you look at other clips and you go online and look at things and one thing leads to another.

When you saw the students working and experimenting with the music gear you brought in, did it remind you of the experimental roots of the music you were talking about?

It felt like it was a reflection of a new generation. There is a moment when the young people get to play on equipment that was used on some seminal house music records. I wanted a bit of fun, like a breakout session, because however much you play with something on a screen or a computer, there’s nothing quite like getting your hands on a physical object and making sounds from it. 

I thought that was an endearing and important part of the film. In most secondary schools now, there is so little provision for music making that, it felt like the right thing to do to give the young people an opportunity to play on these things and make sound.

You can make something that sounds pretty good quite quickly and easily, and they get a beat going and start playing over it. It’s fantastic. 

There is a major political thread throughout the lecture. Do you think contemporary dance music is as connected with politics as it was in the past?

I don’t know much about what’s going on now. I know a little bit, but, I think the big difference between music then and now is that now a lot of dance music has very strong lyrical content while most of the big songs from the ‘80s and ‘90s were instrumentals with maybe repetitive lyrics.

What was political was that you were actually in a field or somewhere you weren’t meant to be. The context was very politicised, even if the lyrics weren’t. The fact that you would be doing something in a place where you shouldn’t have been or were gathering en masse was itself a political act, even though it might not seem like that, it might just seem like a big party.

What was happening was a disruption of order and of what was expected of you. Any mass movement after the miner’s strike, which ended in 1985, was seen through the lens of being a problem. Just gathering bodies together was seen as an issue by the government.

Maybe it reminded them of striking miners trying to get to a picket or trying to get to a pit or something like that. There was this strange echo of what had happened before and that gave it a political edge. Of course, because the parties weren’t regulated, they were initially illegal, which meant the law had to change.

How important do you think it is that young ravers now know about the history that’s come before them?

It’s always interesting to know the history, not just for dance music. It gives you context and also perspective. This film is really about perspective. It was never meant to be a series of interviews with middle-aged men sitting in a recording studio or in front of their record collection, talking about how amazing it was when they went to parties and the drugs they took and reminiscing. It’s not meant to be a sentimental film in that respect or one that’s nostalgic.

It’s a film that takes a few steps back and looks at the bigger picture about Britain at the time and how dance music changed the country and pushed history forward, might, you know, push it. 

There’s a quote by a French philosopher–”music is prophecy”– and, in a way, house music and acid house were a prophecy of what the future could be in technology and how people related to each other. It showed us the future and we’ve taken some aspects of it, good and bad, I think.

It’s really a film about how music changes society and can intervene in history and push history forward.

Tell me about the diagram and imagery of Stonehenge that are also in your installation. 

The diagram I made when I was 19. I drew it originally in 1996 when I was making a project where a brass band played acid house music called Acid Brass. It sounds like a joke, in a way, and it’s meant to be an absurd diagram that charts the relationship between these two musical movements. In a sense, the diagram tells a story about Britain in the 20th century, going from industrial to post-industrial culture. If you look at the diagram, you can see the connections–they both meet media hysteria and civil unrest through the miner’s strike and trade unions and brass bands.

It’s called the history of the world because, for some people, this is their world. Weirdly, it serves as the script for the film, which I made over 20 years later. As soon as house music happened in Britain and I was looking at it from a distance I knew something important was happening in the country.

The other image in the room is a negative image of Stonehenge, which was taken on a fashion shoot I did there. And, today’s solstice day or some of this evening will be solstice. Stonehenge appears in the film and every other documentary about Britain. Stonehenge is always present in a sense. It’s always present in our lives. there’s always something happening there that we think about. It represents us. I thought it was appropriate that Stonehenge should be in the room watching over us.

Do you think it’s important that popular and dance music are exhibited in art-focused spaces?

Well, of course, I’m an artist, but this work is probably the least artful-looking work in the exhibition. I would argue that it’s a very traditional documentary but you can still see it as an artwork.

For me, what’s important about shows like this–and it’s something I believe in my work–is that music is an art form. Popular music and dance music should be taken seriously. It wasn’t for a long time and was denigrated. House music, especially, was denigrated in the media as just being meaningless.

Obviously, it’s full of meaning, especially for the people that loved it. It was their lives, it is our lives. Pop music and pop culture is something that should be examined and looked at by artists. That doesn’t have to make it serious because it’s a very playful exhibition but it’s an important subject matter because it’s so special to people and it’s full of meaning as well.

Music documents change in society, and it changes societies. It’s the art form that does that more than anything else. It changes attitudes, but it can change histories and social histories especially. 

Buy tickets to The Vinyl Factory: Reverb at 180 Studios now.

180 Studios
180 The Strand, London, WC2R 1EA
22 May, 2024 – 2 March, 2025

10am – 7pm, Wednesday – Sunday

Watch next: Patch Notes: Atomised Listening

The post Interview: Jeremy Deller appeared first on Fact Magazine.

Paul Cousins is a composer and sound artist from London who uses vintage reel-to-reel tape machines and effects to loop and reshape his electronic productions. “I like using sequential stages to create music, and I’m interested in how technological limitations can change the creative process,” he tells Fact. Cousins was one of the first contributors to our Patch Notes series back in 2020, and in this performance he returns with a performance of his new installation, Atomised Listening.

“Atomised Listening is the idea of music being seemingly disconnected moments rather than a unified composition, a concept by Theodor Adorno,” Cousins explains. “Using tape machines, I wanted to create a multi-channel, asynchronous work along these lines that is participatory. With this installation, the tape loops are the ‘atoms’  and the listener becomes the performer, actively engaging in the experience. The composition evolves until the next user interacts with the work, using the mixing desk.”

In Atomised Listening, Cousins aims to explore our relationship with obsolete technology by repurposing the original function of the tape machine. “1/4″ tape has a certain character, and often contains imperfections that I’m interested in highlighting,” Cousins says. “It’s inspiring to hear a recording format’s influence on a composition, and I enjoy leaning into the limitations of tape rather than searching for subjective perfection.”

Atomised Listening was recorded at The Cause in London, using five Akai reel-to-reel machines from the 1960s and ’70s, a Roland Space Echo RE-201 and a TEAC M-30 mixing desk. “I needed five to create this installation, plus another five as backup,” Cousins explains. “Finding and servicing the machines was quite a long process.”

Follow Cousins on Instagram and find his debut album, Vanishing Artefacts, at Bandcamp.

Credits:

Written & Produced by Paul Cousins
Directed by Ed Harber
Thanks to Oscar Coakley & Bruce, and Stuart Glen at The Cause

Read next: The Vinyl Factory celebrates art and sound with immersive exhibition at 180 Studios

The post Patch Notes: Atomised Listening appeared first on Fact Magazine.

Gabriel Massan and LYZZA both want to build new worlds, but it’s up to us to figure out how to navigate them. This shared conviction from the scene-defining CGI artist and DIY wunderkind is foundational to Third World, a multi-level, “offline metaverse,” which Massan describes as a “consciousness-raising game that explores Black indigenous Brazilian experience.” Commissioned by Serpentine Arts Technologies and featuring Web3 integrations built on the Tezos Blockchain, the game explores ignorance towards the outdated notion of the “third world” while drawing from ideas of shared cultural memory, speculative and fictionalised archaeology, and the construction of virtual ecologies around how we feel, rather than how we live or how we are represented. Third World also serves as a platform for an ever-expanding team of artists, developers, and critics, including Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Novíssimo Edgar, Carlos Minozzi, Masako Hirano, Marcinho Manga, Ralph McCoy, Alexandre Pina, and LYZZA, who not only created the soundtrack but worked on every bit of sound design across the entire game.

Taking cues from academic Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation,” a practice of including fictional detail alongside factual material in order to expand, develop, and add specificity to writing about Black history, Massan and LYZZA use their experiences as markers to guide their own exploration of the worlds they seek to build, not as a map for those that follow them. By immersing players in systems designed to replicate the inequalities and injustices experienced by both artists throughout their lives, their work invites us to rethink our relationship with the world around us, a process of communal narrative crafting that, in Hartman’s words, functions as “a way of naming our time, thinking our present and envisioning the past which has created it.”

This feature was originally published in Fact’s S/S 2023 issue, which is available to buy here.

LYZZA: Gabriel and I worked on Third World simultaneously; he was building the world as I was creating the sounds separately. Working with sound design prior to this, I would usually receive finished material and then work through that, but at this point it was so abstract, there was nothing except for mood boards of what the world would look like. We really do like the same kind of references.

Gabriel Massan: Cute and disturbing! I always want to bring everyone that inspires me to co-create, to imagine themselves in a different reality. I want my friends to experience a world that is not based on their identities, to rethink everything in a way that is not really related to us or the way we are.

L: That’s what I found so interesting about working on this video game together! I had no idea what the final project was gonna look like, I just had notes and keywords from you.

GM: I didn’t want to bring any specific sound references as the game’s not based on the idea of representation, unlike the first game I made with artists from rural areas in Brazil, which was for young children living in favelas. This time I knew I was working in Europe and that my audience was mostly white, so I didn’t want to give them my identity for them to play with. This was my way of exploring the ignorance towards the concept of the “third world.” How can I criticise how people navigate the world itself? We are entering this era of digital worlds and we’ll probably be navigating those worlds with the same concepts and in the ways we are navigating the real world. How can I make a world in which you’re thinking that you’re doing one thing, but you’re actually being portrayed in another? I like to disturb and to annoy and to cause discomfort, because this is something that I feel almost every day. I love to make things that don’t really make any sense, for you to find the sense in yourself. Sometimes this sense is problematic, because you are problematic! This is what I like to reflect in my work, this nonsense that in the end is not senseless, it’s meaningful.

L: Through the removal of sense you create space for people to fill, that’s the only way you’re gonna be able to find yourself in a world where everyone is tied to their physical identity. It’s not just Black people, it’s everyone. The only way to get people to actually find out who they are is by removing this sense of what the world wants to put upon us. Some people think that my music is uncomfortable, but I hope that everybody can listen to it. I do like to rustle some feathers, but more to expand your horizons and make you question things. I don’t necessarily want people to be disturbed. If you are, maybe there’s a reason for that, you can figure that out by yourself. What I love about art is being able to create something that is critical, but still finding some way to reach out your hand to people and let them into that critique. My rift with the music and art industry is that the digestibility of the finished product is valued over certain conversations that should be had. Artists get forced into a system where everyone has to understand their work, leading their audiences to stop questioning it completely, which then creates a very homogenous culture. That’s how a lot of things slip through the cracks.

GM: We live in a world where everything needs to be explained. Everything needs to be digested.

L: I always think about this when it comes to our work. Within fine art it’s acceptable to make people uncomfortable; it still can be considered great art. This is what I struggle with in music—for some reason everything has to be liked. I don’t necessarily make music that’s supposed to be digested to a point where you like it; it’s supposed to make you feel something that is not always enjoyable. That’s what is really cool about your art as well, it does definitely make you feel things. A lot of visual art, especially 3D work, is so commodifiable and so easily turned into a product. It can very quickly become something that’s supposed to look super pretty, all smooth and bubbly. A big part of what makes your work uncomfortable is that you take the time to include so much texture.

GM: But at the same time I’m using cute colours and cute drawings. It creates some confusion, which I like.

L: There’s so much power within that. I have always loved not knowing what’s going on, when you have no context. You remove the sense, you like it, but you don’t know why, so you have to question it. There’s this moment of the question that makes both our works so intangible and we find each other in that. It’s been really nice to find someone that creates work that allows me to explore worlds without having to relate to stuff that already exists. That’s what I love about sound design, you’re creating sounds that are non-existent in our current realities. It almost forces you to explore in a different way, to move in a way you haven’t moved before. Our work gives people the space and the freedom to create their own story. It’s funny that neither of us is trained; it’s probably the reason why we’re creating these new references instead of taking from what we’ve been taught. We have to explore ourselves to be able to even get to the point where we’re at today, because who’s gonna teach us!

GM: When I started I wanted to create situations and scenarios that were close to me. I wanted to talk about violence without using the same old images of violence, I wanted to talk about race, or racism, without forcing the topic. I was trying to replicate what was inside my head, or inside my heart, but in a way that wouldn’t feel triggering for people, or triggering for me. When I started to do video art was when I first started to see myself as an artist. At that time I was always talking about topics that were much bigger than me, trying to represent the other’s perspective, but I realised that I just want to tell my own story without needing to call it out for everyone, that I’m not everyone’s saviour. Now I really want to create beings and objects without a strong connection with humankind, or even signs and symbols that we use as a society. It’s a way to tell stories without leading with prejudice.

L: For me, making music is actually the only space and time that I have to not be political. I’m able to explore these more complex sides of myself outside of how the world might view me, because my existence in this world is always politicised. Through my music I want people to understand me through complexity and connect with that feeling of being understood. Being born in Brazil, moving to Europe, being part of the Afro-Latino diaspora, and also coming from quite a broken family, I think I never knew where I belonged. In Europe especially, being Black is such a different thing. When I first moved to the Netherlands people would make comments about stereotypically African American things because the concept of Blackness is such an Americanised idea, but my Brazilian side was completely overlooked. People group you together with their ideas of what Blackness means and you lose parts of yourself. Within my music, it’s just been me trying to piece together these parts and exploring how I feel. I have to create these new sounds to feel like I’m telling my own story and have other people relate to that, that’s how I truly feel seen. Every genre has been touched by Black presence or history and because of that I did not feel like there was any space for me to say what I wanted to say without being tied to these historical movements of sound. So, I guess I make my music for myself, but I really appreciate how that in itself translates to people who also feel the need to be connected or understood; they can relate to that part of my creation. It’s just wanting to feel like you belong to something, I think that’s where the world building comes in.

GM: When you put our work together, we’re both talking about self-expression, but in a way that is complex and abstract.

L: Neither of us is really seeking to tell people what to think about our work. We’re not telling people how they’re supposed to perceive it.

GM: The lack of direct paths makes the work intangible, which is a word that you always use about sound. I think my work is also like that, but what defines both worlds is the technique. When it comes to thinking about colonialism, it’s really how this or that cannot be put inside a box. Our work dives in a different way, it can’t be described as only one thing, like: this is Black music, or this is a Black artist. This is something people normally struggle to understand.

L: That’s the only way in which I feel that my music gets colonised, when people try to frame it within my identity above anything. White artists specifically get so much more space to create art from whatever point they want to. When people describe me as a Black artist, I sometimes want to ask: At the end of the day is my work only worth a conversation about my physical identity?

GM: Should we always say these things? Should we always carry them? Even though we are not bringing these topics to the centre of the conversation in our work, institutions usually do—those in charge are looking to POC artists to bring this conversation inside their institutions. They start to apply this pressure—we need to talk more about Black culture, we need to talk more about Indigenous culture, how can we portray this? How is your practice decolonial? When I’m creating, I’m creating based on my own history. My existence in this space is already decolonial, the way I’m making art is already decolonial. Everything that I’m doing is already decolonial, so why do you need to ask me? Why do institutions need to put pressure on me, to ask me about space and explain to me how important it is?

L: It’s like, bitch, I’m here! That’s how I’m decolonising this space.

GM: It’s really hard to navigate. Immigrating to Europe relocates your mind. Changing cities is one thing, but changing continents changes your whole history. When I came to Spain in 2019 for my first residency, my art gained a bit of distance from my personal experience. I started to think more about the emotional side of it, the memory of my culture, what culture was for me. How can I write my own story? I don’t have any access to what came before my grandpa and my grandma, I just know they came from different areas of Brazil. I started to rethink how I can access my own history. My unconscious vision for creating pieces comes from this need to see symbols and images that I can relate to, drawing this map of things from my past that I now have the power, through creativity and technology, to bring back. It’s this constant exercise of trying to redraw my history, to get closer to the past and critique it. I don’t know how many sculptures I’ve made, but it all feels like archeological research. Saidiya Hartman has this term in her practice, “critical fabulation.” You take real facts and write a story by putting fictional writing into it. I think in the same way, but way more fictionalised.

L: I feel like that’s probably the whole reason why my music sounds the way it does. As opposed to you, I think I’ve always very much known who I was, I just had a really hard time feeling able to relate truly who I am to the world because there are so many perceptions that are put upon my outside shell. The only way for me to dig deeper within that is with music and sounds. I create music that feels logical for me to make, it’s a creative expression of me taking in my feelings, my surroundings, and how I feel in the moment and then converting that into sound.

WORDS: Henry Bruce-Jones
PICTURES: Reece Owen
ART DIRECTION: Gabriel Massan & LYZZA

PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANTS: Dominik Slowi, Kamila Banks
STYLING: Lucy-Isobel Bonner
HAIR: Yuho Kamo
MUA: Charlie Murray
PRODUCTION: 180 Studios
TECHNICAL DIRECTOR: Pawel Ptak

This feature was originally published in Fact’s S/S 2023 issue, which is available to buy here.

Read next: Interview: Tschabalala Self

The post Interview: Gabriel Massan & LYZZA appeared first on Fact Magazine.

A Black woman is seated in her finery, upright posture, paying you no mind. Or her legs are splayed, an open secret. Or she is bent over, her gaze turned towards the floor, nonchalant and carefree. Many of the artist Tschabalala Self’s paintings are character studies of these kinds. She presents us with figures that are full of action; charismatic, imbued with distinct and colourful personalities, but they do not perform for our gaze or attention. We happen upon them. They are allowed to be.

Self’s work combines paint, textiles, and discarded materials she uses to fashion her own language that can speak to and from the positions of these characters. As a Black woman artist, her work is often read politically: how the figures in her paintings relate to wider conversations or struggles around race, gender, and sexuality. But representation is but one facet of the work. Running through her art is a complex interiority that belies the stereotypes that are projected onto the figures she paints or sculpts.

Since her graduation from Yale in 2015, Self has exhibited widely in art institutions across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In this abridged version of her long conversation with Fact, Self takes us through questions of heritage, identity, and what it means and looks like to be a practicing artist today.

This feature was originally published in Fact’s F/W 2023 issue, which is available to buy here.

Gazelle Mba: What drives you to make work in difficult or tough periods of your life?

Tschabalala Self: I’m still able to make work on those days because it’s a practice. It’s similar to other practices you have in life, from eating well, exercise, or a particular way of moving. Because it’s a practice, it’s something that I have to do all the time for my own health. Making the work is cathartic and often very healing.

GM: In another interview you stated that you strive to maintain a separation between your inner self and private life and the work. Could you talk a bit about this need for separation?

TS: I like to have a separation because I want to hold a piece of myself back for myself. Making art and making it available for a wider public are two separate things. If you’re an artist, you can and will always make art regardless of how other people engage with it. Making art is actually quite a solitary experience. When you get into exhibiting your work that’s a whole other process. I think that it is really good to leave everything on the table in the making of the artwork. But because it can be so political, (there’s many different kinds of people with many different kinds of intentions involved in the art world), I don’t think it’s always so good to leave all of yourself on the table. In terms of my personal life and my public self and how they are presented in my work, everything is more fluid and more porous. The other reason I do that, though, is because I feel even as an artist, you should be somewhat objective. I think artists are ultimately vessels of information, channeling ideas from a particular moment. I believe in a little bit of distance in making art, so that you allow yourself to be used for that purpose of transmitting those ideas. I also think it’s helpful to make work that is not so tethered to your ego but to your ideas which come from real-world influences.

GM: It seems like in the separation you create space in your work to think about Blackness and gender as an idea untethered to your own ego or specific experiences.

TS: I would agree with the statement. This has always been my issue with some artwork that deals with identity politics, because in trying to critique the ways in which one is treated as a result of their idea of their identity there is a validation of the fact that you are distinct from other people. Again, I think objectivity is important because you can’t concede to the fact that these identities are real aspects of your entire being. They are things that are on you more and less so, inside of you, right? And in the instances where they are inside of you, you have to be able to define what that means for yourself, not just concede to whatever society is saying that means.

My work is about my identity but many hundreds, millions of other people share my Blackness, my wom- anhood. These are things that are not unique identities to me, so I can’t personally define that for millions of people. I can speak about what that identity has meant to me, and I want to speak about it from a place of my truth, not reacting to what society at large is saying that identity means. My work uses tropes and stereotypes, because those are things that I view as cultural tools or markers that I can tap into, visually or subliminally, when engaging the larger zeitgeist. I ultimately believe that whatever identity you have in society is real, as it affects your daily life, but I feel all corporeal experience is just one facet of you. There are other facets unrelated to your physical experience. I think that art has to really speak to both those aspects of people.

GM: If you could meet your younger artist self, what would you tell her?

TS: I would tell her that your art practice is going to be the most consistent thing for you in your entire life and that you should really nurture this gift as it will help you get through any and all circumstances. It’s like your genie—so treat it as such.

GM: That reminds me of this Giorgio Agamben essay where he talks about the Latin roots of the word ‘genius,’ which is where the word genie comes from—it referred to the god who becomes each man’s guardian at birth. Genius would bestow gifts on the individual, but those gifts were not intended to be hoarded, they were to be shared. This also relates to the notion of practice, which allows the gift to be made tangible or available to others. I think practice as an idea manifests in your work through the interplay between daily life and art making. Take your Bodega Run series for example, could you talk about that?

TS: I think that everyday life is fascinating, and also I’m a people watcher. I get so much information from seeing people do simple things, observing their expressions, certain ways of looking or walking or affects. Because my work is all figurative I spend quite a lot of time on that kind of stuff. Any interaction with another person can produce an idea that I want to preserve as a painting or artwork or project. The bodega is such a commonplace institution, going to the bodega is basically essentially like going to the corner store. Everyone has had an analogous experience in every city, even a small town, but the New York City bodega is quite a unique place for a number of political and socio-historical reasons. I was able to make not just one work about that experience, but an entire series about it.

GM: A lot of critics situate your work as emerging Black urban centres like Harlem and New York at large but I also see a lot of similarities between your paintings and the work of African American folk artists like Clementine Hunter and Dean Butler. Do you see your work as being in conversation with African American folklore or being about a Black pastoral or bucolic?

TS: I definitely do. I grew up in Harlem. All of my siblings, except my oldest sibling, were born in New York. My whole identity is very much rooted in being raised in Harlem, a very Black neighbourhood, a village inside the city. It’s really shaped my perspective. But my family is not from New York. My parents grew up in New Orleans, which is a much smaller city in Louisiana. My parents’ grandparents were from Natchez, Mississippi, a rural southern city. And my dad’s family was from rural Louisiana, places called Slaughter and called Homer, which are north of New Orleans. So that’s also a big part of my identity. I still like to speak about what it means to be Black American, because I think it’s not often accepted as being an identity in America or even within Black America. My family is Black American and that’s the only thing we know. I feel like the South is really my origin. The American South is a very different place culturally and physically than the north and the cities. The migration narrative is a big aspect of Black American identity, too. I think about the South as Louisiana and Mississippi. That’s where my family really started. But having not grown up there myself, my understanding of it is always a little bit of a personal fiction, I’ve always imagined it more than knowing what it really is. Sometimes that fantasy element comes into my work.

GM: What would you like your legacy to be?

TS: Someone that was sincere and generous. So many people do not tell the truth and that does a disservice to them and to others. Half truths are not true. People don’t want to speak truthfully about their experiences. It’s really important, especially in art making to not phone it in. I also think that relates to generosity, a generosity of spirit in terms of really giving your all to your practice.

WORDS: Gazelle Mba

This feature was originally published in Fact’s F/W 2023 issue, which is available to buy here.

Read next: Interview: Freeka Tet

The post Interview: Tschabalala Self appeared first on Fact Magazine.

Freeka Tet can’t decide whether he’s a hacker, a magician or a sell-out. This might be because he spends most of his time inhabiting all of three of these roles. During his conversation with Fact he emphasises the importance of one of his many self-administered tattoos, the seemingly nonsensical phrase ‘ou ou et ou ou et et’, which curls across his chest in spidery cursive. “If you translate it into English it means: ‘or or and or or and and’, he explains. “Are you an ‘or’ person or are you an ‘and’ person, are you like ‘this or this’, or like ‘this and this’? Are you everything or do you need to decide?”

It’s an enduring sentiment that dates back to his formative years playing in various underground noise scenes in Bordeaux and Paris, a creative outlet he juggled alongside studying advertising and graphic design. “I was really confused by the fact that I was doing my studies in advertising at the same time as being in the noise scene, playing in punk squats and doing tattoos for people. I got really lost in it”, he says. “I needed to make a decision, was I going to have a career in advertising, was I going to be an experimental musician, or was I going to be a tattoo artist? I felt like I couldn’t be all of them.” 

This feature was originally published in Fact’s F/W 2020 issue, which is available to buy here.

Fast-forward to the present day and Freeka Tet has proved his younger self spectacularly wrong. The multidisciplinary artist, designer, programmer and performer has one foot in the commercial mainstream, working with Google, Childish Gambino and Margiela, with the other planted firmly in the mulch of the experimental electronic underground, conducting deranged noise performances using only his face, making music without instruments or music software and designing eerie animatronics for avant-pop provocateurs Amnesia Scanner.

Using emergent technology, creative coding and a hacker’s approach to artistic production, he creates playful works that interrogate and subvert contemporary attitudes towards cultural consumption. His practice promotes, in his own words, “doing without knowing”, taking on deeply technical projects based on processes of learning and investigation while remaining untethered from any specific discipline or methodology. Rarely pausing for breath, he bounces around the new media landscape with an omnivorous appetite for original forms, new models and truly authentic modes of self-expression, all of which stem from a potent strain of creative indecisiveness. Boiled down into a deeply personal mantra, this potency is now immortalised in ink. As he explains: “I did this tattoo to be like: ‘It’s ok, man. You don’t need to decide’”.

You can trace Freeka Tet’s restlessness all the way back to his first musical projects, a diverse and ambitious body of work defined only by a stubborn reluctance to stick within the narrow confines of a single genre. This is evidenced by the artist’s long list of musical aliases, which includes Surrr Grrr, Sgure, Sgur£, Maxi Bacon, a collaboration with Scott Sinclair, aka Australian noisecore artist Company Fuck, and Gazormass, a collaboration with Orion Bouvier, one half of French electroclash duo Kap Bambino. Growing up listening to Jamiroquai, Marilyn Manson and Korn, his taste was dictated by his crowd: “I was in the South of France, I was in Bordeaux. So it was like: dreadlocks, skating, Korn, whatever.”

However, his passive listening habits were soon disrupted by the discovery of Mr. Bungle and Fantômas, the alt-metal fusion projects of Faith No More’s Mike Patton. The dizzying rage of Patton’s sonic vocabulary, both literally in terms of his voice, which spans no fewer than six octaves, and in terms of genre, was the spark that would inspire him to make his own music. A love of Japanese vocalist Yamatsuka Eye and Houston hip-hop architect DJ Screw cemented his love for the loud, noisy and twisted, all of which are qualities that inform his early sound.

An ongoing fascination with computer music developed into several experimental electronic projects, but it was with his early recordings as Sgure that Tet found serious recognition. One early fan of the project was Stevo Pearce, the founder of Some Bizzare Records, who included the Sgure track ‘Booyaka Vs Jalla’ on the obscure compilation Some Bizzare Double Album, a 2008 update to the 1981 cult classic Some Bizzare Album that first introduced audiences to Depeche Mode and The The. Another was James Kirby, who would go on to release Sgure’s 2007 album Anulus Pexie on the V/Vm Test Records sub-label Vukzid.

“I remember him telling me about the idea for The Caretaker in 2007”, says Freeka Tet. “Because I was doing all this Max/MSP stuff, I remember thinking that it was quite lazy! At that moment I couldn’t understand his point.” At this early stage of his career the most effusive supporter of the project was Mary Anne Hobbs, who in 2007 described the experience of listening to his tracks on her BBC Radio 1 show as, “like you’ve been pushed from the top of the Empire State Building”.

An unwavering proclivity for complexity fuelled the artist’s continued experiments with Max/MSP, a visual programming language that has become an essential tool for a generation of experimental musicians. “Sound for me at first was literally sound, it was not music”, he explains. “It was something that needed to be physical. There was already some kind of terrorism, or vandalism, in the sound. When I started using Max/MSP I became more interested in visuals. So when I started doing visuals that became the vandalism”.

It was also around this time that the artist started to get more seriously into hacking, something he partly attributes to his love of the software. “With Max, you need to be a hacker, or at least it feels like you’re hacking something. You need to go into something and touch cables together and kind of hack it. Most of the time it doesn’t work.” This anarchic and haphazard attitude towards music production began to influence the way Freeka Tet approached the industry he somewhat reluctantly found himself a part of.

Hacking was a major part of his strategy to introduce the world to Erson Rybod, an enigmatic and resolutely anonymous producer with whom he still works closely. This included some online booking agency trickery that ensured Rybod’s first shows were remarkably well-attended for a complete unknown, as well as a planned publicity stunt that rides the thin line between the ingenious and the nefarious.

“Rybod came up at around the same time that Syro from Aphex Twin was released, 10 years after he had disappeared and was coming back”, explains Tet. “So obviously Warp had a massive marketing budget. I used cSploit, which is a hacking tool, to look at how easy it would be to hack the label’s website and the plan was to put Rybod’s track and picture up on the day of the album’s launch.” Ultimately he decided against the stunt for fear of legal repercussions, although he still stands by the idea: “pranking Aphex Twin can only be a good thing.”

By his own admission, Freeka Tet is less interested in the mechanics of hacking than he is in the mentality behind it. “I’m a hacker, but I’m not really devoted to the cause. Doing hacking is one thing but doing hacking without getting caught is another thing entirely.” He cites proto-meme formats such as YouTube Poop, a hyperactive video editing practice in which YouTube videos are ripped from the site and vandalised with shitpost audio-visual collage and deranged media manipulation, as a crucial influence on his current digital art practice.

This is evident in 7h3 p1c7u23 0f f4c371m3, a satirical take on the concept of a live-streamed performance that sees Freeka Tet hijacking FaceTime conversations with his friends using a face-mapping program and real-time generative sound design software to conduct a frenetic noise performance using only his face. Obscured by dead pixels and motion blur, he smashes together scorched-earth edits of Giant Claw and EPROM with a frenzied sequence of twitches and yawns. At one point he pulls away from the screen, revealing a 3D-rendered model of himself sitting cross-legged with his face thrust through the laptop, emoting wildly from an infinitely recurring virtual void. Finally, he merges with an animatronic pink robot mouth for a climactic session of cybernetic karaoke.

For Freeka Tet, magic, hacking and art are fundamentally aligned, subsumed into a broader mission to develop his creative practice into something complex enough to meet the impossible demands of the new media attention economy. He references another famous magician to illustrate this: “David Blaine is like a hacker, in a way. He’s hacking his body. You could be a magician, a hacker, a visual artist or an artist working with technology, it all comes via the same path, which is about understanding something and cracking the code.”

Someone else Freeka Tet attributes as having cracked this code is artist Justice Yeldham. Infamous for his extraordinarily bloody performances, in which he creates ear-shredding cacophony by licking, smashing and biting a pane of cut glass attached to several contact mics, Yeldham brings a similarly subversive energy to stage spectacle. “To do something really different, you have to go somewhere where not a lot of people can follow you. And there are very few people that are good enough to do that. Either it’s because they’re a really good performer, or it’s because they’re insane.” Whatever the medium, it is through technical mastery that Freeka Tet is able to continually pull the rug from under his audience during his performances, a form of creative control he understands as fundamental to the practice of hacking.

WORDS: Henry Bruce-Jones

This feature was originally published in Fact’s F/W 2020 issue, which is available to buy here.

Read next: Interview: Lyra Pramuk

The post Interview: Freeka Tet appeared first on Fact Magazine.

Theaster Gates, Devon Turnbull, Caterina Barbieri, Jeremy Deller, Carsten Nicolai, Es Devlin and Virgil Abloh all feature as part of REVERB, a major multimedia exhibition exploring the intersection of art and sound curated by The Vinyl Factory, now open at 180 Studios until 10 November, 2024. Tickets are on sale now.

The largest show of its kind, REVERB brings together over 100 artists and musicians working across visual arts, music, film and live performance. The exhibition showcases the breadth of The Vinyl Factory’s commissions and collaborations over the past 20 years, including site-specific audio-visual installations and sonic experiences from artists including Theaster Gates, Es Devlin and Julianknxx.

REVERB also features UK premieres of artworks by Kahlil Joseph, Stan Douglas, Virgil Abloh and Cecilia Bengolea, as well as installations by Caterina Barbieri, Jeremy Deller, William Kentridge, Jenn Nkiru, Hito Steyerl, Carsten Nicolai and Gabriel Moses.

Hi-Fi Listening Room Dream No.1, created by and programmed with New York artist Devon Turnbull, creates a meditative space within the exhibition to listen to vinyl with an evolving programme of unheard music, including exclusive test pressings and studio outtakes. 

A wide-ranging programme of live performances and talks will also take place alongside the exhibition. A new work by Theaster Gates, Amplified, will exist as a sonic installation during the day and transform into a space that hosts live performances by night, with shows by established and emerging musicians recorded and pressed direct-to-disc on The Vinyl Factory Lathe.

100 vinyl records created by artists and released by The Vinyl Factory are also on display in a new space designed by Ben Kelly. These include releases by Nan Goldin, Arthur Jafa, Pipilotti Rist, William Kentridge, Mica Levi, Marina Abramovic, Grace Jones, Yussef Dayes, Es Devlin, Fred Again, Thom Yorke, Ragnar Kjartansson, Massive Attack, Pet Shop Boys, Maurizio Cattelan, Daft Punk, The xx, Rachel Rose, Kojey Radical, Taryn Simon and more.

Tickets for REVERB are on sale now.

REVERB

180 Studios
180 The Strand, London, WC2R 1EA
22 May – 10 November 2024

10am – 7pm, Wednesday – Sunday

Lead image: Carsten Nicolai, Bausatz Noto, 180 Studios, 2024. Photography: Jack Hems

Read next: Interview: United Visual Artists

The post The Vinyl Factory celebrates art and sound with immersive exhibition at 180 Studios appeared first on Fact Magazine.