3 May – 2 June 2019

And We’ll Always Be A Disco In the Glow of Love presents new work by London-based artist Ain Bailey. This will include a commissioned audio composition installed in Cubitt’s gallery within a spatial design by Mexico City based designer Clemence Seilles.

And We’ll Always Be A Disco In the Glow of Love takes Ain’s own sonic biography around loss and thinking through how to sonify grief as a starting point. It asks how we might create a collective dialogue around the personal experience of dealing with death and mourning.

This new work has been developed through conversations with eight close friends who have experienced a bereavement. Ain’s own contribution links these together to form nine distinct parts. These nine contributions centre on the sound(s) of that experience–an audio memory, a song, affect or emotion. The process of working with and from these recordings interrogates how we think about death sonically and produces a collective composition. The number nine is significant as it draws on the Caribbean funerary tradition of Nine-Nights, in which a wake takes place over several days.

Ain Bailey’s practice involves an exploration of sonic autobiographies, specifically how people use sound to create a sense of place. Central to this is the idea of ‘sonic biography', the personal constellation of sounds that form an individual identity and collaboration with performance, visual and sonic artists.

As part of the exhibition Ain Bailey has invited three musicians, Elaine Mitchener, Hannah Catherine Jones and Rebecca Bellantoni to perform live within the space across three weekends in May, responding directly to the context of the exhibition.

A new scenography for the gallery designed and installed by Clemence Seilles continues the collaboration between Cubitt and Seilles initiated at the start of the Structures That Cooperate programme that opened in October 2018. This new design and spatial arrangement is the second part of an evolving support structure to host, hold, make space for (and adapt to) the work of artists, collectives, commissions, film screenings, events and workshops.

Saturday 11 May 3PM a performance by Elaine Mitchener. 

Born and raised in East London of Jamaican heritage, Elaine Mitchener is a contemporary vocal-movement artist and composer who has worked with leading artists including: Moor Mother, Mark Padmore, The Otolith Group, Sonia Boyce, David Toop, Tansy Davies, Van Huynh Co, Irvine Arditti, Apartment House, London Sinfonietta, Steve Beresford, Christian Marclay, Phil Minton, George E. Lewis, Jason Yarde, Alexander Hawkins. Her UK/European performances include: Bimhuis, Café Oto, 56th Venice Biennale, ICA London, Southbank Centre, Maerzmusik/SAVVY Contemporary, London Contemporary Music Festival. She is co-founder of experimental jazz group Hawkins/Mitchener Quartet; founder of electro-acoustic trio The Rolling Calf and featured vocalist with ensemble Apartment House.

Sunday 19 May 1PM – A performance by Hannah Catherine Jones. 

Hannah Catherine Jones (aka Foxy Moron) is a London-based artist, scholar, multi-instrumentalist, radio presenter and DJ (BBC Radio 3 – Late Junction, NTS – The Opera Show), composer, conductor and founder of Peckham Chamber Orchestra – a community project established in 2013. Jones is currently an AHRC DPhil scholar at Oxford University for which the ongoing body of work The Oweds will be presented as a series of live and recorded audio-visual episode-compositions using disruptive sound as a methodology of institutional decolonisation.

Sat 25 May, 3PM – A performance by Rebecca Bellantoni. 

Rebecca Bellantoni is an artist born and living in London, of Caribbean descent. She works with everyday occurrences and abstracts them; with a focus on the lives and experiences of Black British people. Researching the smaller communities that have developed with the larger one. Viewing through the lens of pre and post colonial culture, metaphysics, comparative theology, religion and/or spirituality; the crossovers, the aesthetics of them. Simultaneously working with colour and its codes and objects and their ascribed cultural meanings to further question and describe. In terms of material and process, Bellantoni's practice is gleefully sprawling and encompasses video, performance, sound-text, photography, textiles, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, installation, writing and silversmithing.