Press & Interviews

Evan Ifekoya’s ‘Ritual Without Belief’ presents an oceanic imagery of sensuous, flowing movement. At its scenographic heart, a printed floor vinyl of submarine patterns rises to a ceiling-high crest at one end of the gallery: once-stable ground that has given way to voluptuous liquidity. The exhibition’s cornerstone – a six-hour audio track of multilayered sound – pulses with techno, underwater samples and a vocal track drawn from literature and theory, conversation and personal reflections.

Much has been said of the seas as a swirling archive of disasters in whose calamitous wake we live. The histories of colonial passages, global capitalism, illegalized migration, ecological crises and the transatlantic slave tradeare all part of its protracted catalogue of horrors. But some, like Ifekoya, have sought to pivot from this morass towards the ocean’s reparative potential. 

While the visual as image keeps the potential for distance and the opportunity to read the body as form and representation, the sound makes us converge in the material aspect of the seen, whose body is there, doubles up, triples up, quadruples and finds a way back to one through video editing techniques and effects that are no doubt digital but in their undisguised simplicity bring an analogue sense to the work. The fades and pop ups, split screens and overlays, highlight the materiality of the seen rather than what it represents, and make the image a thing that is malleable and transformable rather than the stable representation of the original subject. 

The effects are collaged, superimposed and brought next to each other; edges are sought and juxtapositions created whose reality is performed in sound. Listening, we hear the work's dimensionality that expands its frame and gives us access to its movements where it is not about what is seen but how it is agitated and agitating its own reality between hands and bodies, things and words, that are not separate constituents of one seen but are the invisible material of the image-plane heard from its depth. In listening the image escapes its borders and preconditions. Sound confronts my gaze and preconceptions with an invisible rhythm that beckons participation and questions the visual parameters of negotiation by demanding a more self conscious reflection: the words singing about gender, work, identity, dancing and expectations become mine to resing and reimagine, to own and speak rather than receive, and I have to, as Ifekoya demands, practice self-reflection.