Performance art platform Diasporas Now announced the next stop of their 2023-2024 U.K. tour at Humber Street Gallery.

The line-up featured performances by artists of colour Nadeem Din-Gabisi, Sattva, Bakani Pick-Up Company, Gisou Golshani, James Jordan Johnson, DJ Winggold, and Collectif Echoes, spanning performance art, dance, live music, and DJ sets embodying themes of ancestral land, sea and liberation.

About the Humber Street Gallery Line-up:

Bakani Pick-Up is a Zimbabwean-born, Yorkshire-based choreographer and improvisation practitioner.

Their performance “93 Interlude: Pilgrimage to an Alternate Dimension” focuses on the discourse of the Black Dancing body. The work explores how improvisation contextualises Blackness – how autonomy may be exercised through performance.

Sattva is a Vietnamese, Germany-Born interdisciplinary artist based in London known for their geometric movements and depth of musicality – often performing as their alter-ego Sattva Ninja in the ballroom scene.

Their movement and spoken word performance ‘Eye of a Storm’ explores the duality between peace and chaos, and the interdependent relationship of how one cannot exist in this world without its counterpart.

Nadeem Din-Gabisi is an award winning, poet-songwriter and visual artist reimagining blackness as it pertains to his experiences as a British born, second generation immigrant of Sierra Leonean descent.

Nadeem’s performance “flag” will be polemical, comical and consistently questioning what it means to be an immigrant inextricably linked to Britain.

Gisou Golshani is a London-based, multidisciplinary artist. Her ritualistic performances use sound as a medium for multilayered storytelling.

Through movement and chants Gisou interprets a Persian song’s wish for the universe to resolve current entanglements. Guttural and ethereal live vocals are layered onto industrial doom and drone elements. The Persian lyrics call for freedom, and a release from the trap of doomed fate.

James Jordan Johnson is of Afro-Caribbean heritage and from London working within performance, sculpture and research. He is invested in thinking beyond recognized and legible knowledge systems and how such forms of empirical knowledge have reordered how we come to understand spiritual and material forms of culture making.

“Something is Trying to Disappear Me” is a performance exploring the linguistic interest in the Jamaican word ‘yard’, which bears a contextual symbiosis. First within yard referring to soil and flora, to also meaning the living quarters of the home – carrying with it a complex archive of material culture.

DJ Winggold, the stage name of London-based activist, DJ and radio host Charles Olisanekwu, is one of the key minds behind Unbound Events, a London-based events platform using underground music as a vehicle to elevate minorities and raise awareness of social issues.

Drawing from the inherent sense of pain, rage, otherness, beauty and elation in the minority experience, DJ Winggold will be debuting a hybrid rap/DJ set, building a narrative interrogating the experience of what it’s like to be a black man in today’s society. Comprising sounds made solely by black and PoC artists from around the globe, the performance will be a visceral and confrontational soundscape, ultimately giving way to a deep sense of collective catharsis.

Collectif Echoes is a Black diasporic electronic music collective drawing connections between the past, present and future of Afro-diasporic dance music. They reclaim and honour the Black roots of electronic music while showcasing their influence in later emerging genres. Collectif Echoes presents an audio-visual DJ set that contributes to, and celebrates, the Black electronic music archive.

About the Diasporas Now UK Tour

For Diasporas Now’s first national tour, over 20 artists of colour have been selected via open call by the Diasporas Now team (co-founders Rieko Whitfield, Paola Estrella, and Lulu Wang) and an additional guest panel of artists Harold Offeh and Michelle Williams Gamaker.

The tour takes place across three cities – London, Northampton and Hull – in partnership with Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, 13 February, 2024) and NN Contemporary Art (Northampton, 2 November, 2023).

About Diasporas Now

Diasporas Now is a platform for expanded performance by the global majority, programming curated events that bridge workshops, panel discussions, museum lates, and nightlife. Their community celebrates cross-diasporic identities and champions artists of colour.

The platform was founded in 2021 by artists Rieko Whitfield, Paola Estrella, and Lulu Wang at the Royal College of Art. Originally focused on live-streamed programming, Diasporas Now has since expanded to live events at the intersection of performance art, visual art, music, dance, and fashion.

The Diasporas Now U.K. Tour 2023-2024 is supported by the Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant.