Always Coming Home Series: Act IV - Stone Telling - Camden Art Centre

A—Z presents Always Coming Home at Camden Art Centre.

Featuring performances, live sets ands screenings from Harold Offeh, Chooc Ly Tan & Mohammed Rowe, Su Hui Yu and Shamica Ruddock.

This series is the development of a recent research on the affect of visual and sound in narrative. The first iteration of Always Coming Home took place at Iklectik 2023 and carried on at Matt’s Gallery in 2024, as a starting point for ambient sensorial experimentation, a threshold for furthering the ideas of immersion, speculative world and conscious listening.

Each chapter from this on-going investigation aims at introducing a live performance, a moving image and a live musical set.

Thinking of change and flux as part of speculative futures and world building as ways of expressing current socio-political issues and expanding from there to potential other paths.

In line with this proposition, language, and other forms of expression, from the bodily to sound and the non-descriptive, are given a platform to create new ways of thinking and working together: the explorations and considerations of embodied practices as political disruptions.

A reference/inspiration is the work by Pauline Oliveros with the Deep Listening method aspiring to explore expanded consciousness – “Acoustic space is where time and space merge as they are articulated by sound.” (Rose Bandt, Hearing Australian Identity: Sites as acoustic spaces, an audible polyphony, 2020)

The aim of these projects is to build a network and community of artists that have not yet performed together and to introduce to an audience a set of practices – ranging from sound, soundscapes to visuals immersions as well as acting as a ‘wakening’ agents.

A—Z aims to impose a collaborative, inclusive and critical practice/praxis – this demands a responsibility to decolonise programmes, build on positivity towards/and inclusivity in terms of gender and race discourses, and  demonstrate openness, intersectional, responsive and critical juxtaposition methods.

The Artists

The Artists

Harold Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of histories. He employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including Tate Britain and Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Turf Projects, London, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Wysing Art Centre, Studio Museum Harlem, New York, MAC VAL, France, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark and Art Tower Mito,

He studied Critical Fine Art Practice at The University of Brighton, MA Fine Art Photography at the Royal College of Art and recently completed a PhD by practice exploring the activation of Black Album covers through durational performance. He lives in Cambridge and works in London, UK. He previously held the role of Reader in Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University and was a visiting tutor at Goldsmiths College and The Slade School of Art, UCL, London. He is currently a tutor in MA Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art.

Mohammed Rowe, a London-born artist, intricately weaves the tapestry of sound to articulate his expressions and foster communication. Rooted in the urban pulse of his upbringing, his compositions resonate with the essence of found sounds, experimental compositions, and spontaneous musical explorations.

Drawing inspiration from the vivid tapestry of his surroundings, Mohammed employs a diverse arsenal of processes and recording methodologies. These tools allow him to capture and sculpt compositions, each a unique reflection of his sensory experiences.

Beyond the confines of traditional mediums, Mohammed’s artistic vision transcends boundaries. Collaborating seamlessly with artists across disciplines, he integrates his sonic creations into interactive installations, dynamic moving images, film and immersive theatrical performances.

Working across film, installation and live performance, Shamica Ruddock is an artist and a composer whose experiments in sound are informed by a core investment in sound as a site for knowledge production. Interested in dynamics of displacement, transferral, capture and legibility, through practice Shamica attempts to evaluate how these as processes contribute to the way we articulate the everyday. Other research interests extend to acoustics and the built environment, narrative and allegory, bass resonance and the linguistic function of drum language. Shamica has previously held residencies with Brussels experimental sound lab QO2, and Amant Foundation New York. Solo shows include Deciphering a Broken Syntax at South London Gallery (UK) and Palimpsests & Epithets held at Skēnē, Malmö (SE). Solo live presentations include Cafe OTO (UK), Hägerstensåsens medborgarhus (SE) and ArtHouse Jersey (UK). Shamica is currently a Sound and Music In Motion composer. Shamica has an ongoing sound based research project with artist Hannan Jones. Performances include Silent Green Future Soundscapes Festival (DE), Madeira Dig (PT), and Oscillation Festival (BE). They are currently Wysing Arts Centre Artist-in-Residence, supported by Forma and Knotenpunkt.

Chooc Ly Tan is a multi-disciplinary artist, DJ, music & cultural producer who works across moving images, DJ sets, radio podcasts, event organising, and club nights. With a background in sculpture and performance. Her practice sets out to create new visions of reality by subverting or repurposing systems and tools we use to understand the world around us – such as concepts and methodologies from physics, politics and music. Often, Chooc Ly draws attention to power imbalances, using video and sound as mediums to find an experimental cadence within the personal histories, found footage, and political undertows that inform and inflect the Afro-Asian diaspora, in the face of on-going colonialism(s). She runs the platform Décalé, a discursive experimental artist’s platform and club night, in collaboration with artist-curators Léïla Arenou and Kadeem Oak. Together, they aim to showcase artists, poets, music producers and DJs who are disadvantaged by societal norms.

Her work has been shown at RIBA, London; Kunsthall Oslo; CCA/EdUHK Hong Kong; Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, UAE; Celestial Festival, Berlin; Chale Wote Film Labs, Accra, Ghana; and Osmosis Audiovisual Media Festival, Taipei. She has participated in talks as part of the Sonic Culture programme, CalArts – California Institute of the Arts; Decolonising Queer Artistic Space and Practice: Critical Dialogue with Asia-Art-Activism; and Signals: Experiments in Sound at the Tate Modern, London. She is a Lecturer in Fine Art, currently teaching on the MFA Fine Art programme at Goldsmiths and the MA Photography programme at The Royal College of Art in London.

SU (Su Hui-Yu) explores the connection between mass media, pop culture, memories of martial law and the post-colonial history of Taiwan and East Asia. His “Re-shooting” series centers around Taiwanese and East Asian history, memory, re-imagination and transgression. His recent projects engage collective memories and ideologies while exploring the mechanism of oppression and liberation tied to Taiwan cultural values. He obtained an MFA from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2003, and has remained active in the contemporary art scene and the film society ever since. 

SU’s works have been exhibited at renowned exhibitions, festivals, and art institutes, including MOCA Taipei, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Casino Luxembourg, Bangkok Arts and Culture Center, Kunsthalle Winterthur (Switzerland), San Jose Museum of Art (California, USA), Curitiba International Biennial of Contemporary Art (Brazil), 1646 Art Space (Den Haag, The Netherlands) and Power Station of Art (Shanghai, China), the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, the Videonale (Germany), PERFORMA (New York, USA), RISING (Melbourne). In 2017, International Film Festival Rotterdam dedicated a retrospective to SU’s video works, while his video work Super Taboo had its world premiere in the Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films. From the summer of 2023, Su’s new project The Space Warriors series has been tour exhibited at Hyundai ArtLab in Seoul for the finalist of the 5th VH Art Award, ARS Electronica in Linz,  Kunstsammlungen am Theaterplatz in Germany, and Casino Luxembourg. The same year in May, Su’s biggest museum solo The Trio Hall was exhibited in MOCA Taipei, curated by Eugenio Viola. In 2025, The Trio Hall  participated in the Forum section of the 75th Berlinale as a feature film (World premiere).

Anne Duffau is a cultural producer, researcher, and founder of A—Z, an exploratory/nomadic curatorial platform. A—Z aims to open up to audiences by sharing discursive practices in order to challenge preconceived ideas about race, gender identities and so-called history in terms of power relationships. She has worked with PAF Olomouc since 2017, programming screenings and exhibitions. She co-funded and programmed the collectives: Transmissions.tv and Décalé. She is a Tutor at the Royal College of Art’s 

Contemporary Art Practice Programme and works as a freelance producer/researcher for Somerset House Studios. She produces monthly shows on Resonance FM and stegi.radio and live music under Alpha through several projects and collaborations (MAENADS, Polisonics, The New Adolescents). Her latest project was hosted at Matt’s Gallery (May-Sept 2024) and is an ongoing series titled: Always Coming Home.