Ashley Holmes

Performance at Bergen Centre for Electronic Art (BEK)
Bergen, 2024

’A live sound composition developed from readings, text, field recordings, music and improvisations with DJ technology and tools, to explore the types of exchange that take place within different modes of listening.

The performance has developed from research into the relational knowledges and iterative, spatial understandings of Dub, the sub-genre of Reggae, and Devil mixes in Grime music, excavating the spaces between these sounds to examine the ways these genres amplify frequencies, voices and memory.

The performance is based on Holmes’ work on Skylarking, to be shown at Soft Ground in Sheffield in February–May 2024.’

Photos by Petronelle Halvorsen, courtesy of BEK

Distend (Version), 2023
Ashley Holmes & seekersinternational

Audio commission presented as part of In The Offing, group exhibition at Turner Contemporary
Running Time: 05 minutes, 59 seconds

The work expands on a shared interest in sonic fiction and the deconstructive practices of dub music and versioning to explore cultural memory. The work references the earthquake and landslides that struck Port Royal, Jamaica in 1692, reimagining the submerged landscapes and mythologies, connecting Afrodiasporic aural traditions and the natural world.

Distend considers the embedded soundings that remain encoded in objects, recordings, architectural spaces, technology and memory – a subterranean excavation voicing body and voicing dread, through and from echoing vessels. The collaboration sees new version of a work originally made by Ashley Holmes and commissioned by Yorkshire Sculpture International, presented at Leeds Art Gallery in 2021.

’Turner Contemporary presented In The Offing, a group exhibition devised by renowned Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead). Embracing a dual role in this exhibition, Leckey served as both artist and editor, utilising the concept of a magazine editorial as his foundation to choreograph an experience that seamlessly blended moving image, sound, light, and painting throughout the galleries. The phrase ‘in the offing’, dating back to the late 1700s, evokes the image of the distant sea visible from the shoreline and carries a sense of anticipation and foreboding, hinting at what lies on the horizon. Leckey commissioned artists and musicians to make work responding to this title and himself presented a new video. The exhibition was the culmination of a multi-year project generously funded by Freelands Foundation as the Principal Supporter.’

Participating artists included ANGUSRAZE, Lucy Duncombe, Theo Ellison, Ashley Holmes + Seekersinternational, Darren Horton, Mark Leckey, Lost at Sea Project, nakaya mossi, Charlie Osborne, Alessandro Raho, Hannah Rose Stewart + Blackhaine, and Iceboy Violet.

The exhibition was curated with Melissa Blanchflower, Senior Curator, Turner Contemporary and was accompanied by a live programme.

Photos by Reece Straw

Sonic Lecture & Listening Session
Metro 54, Amsterdam (2023)

Lecture-based DJ set interweaving a symphony of tracks that explored dub, tempo, multiplicity, drawing connections between past and present within broader social contexts. Part of three-part series This Sonic Lecture is A Vibe by Metro 54 in July 2023.

Metro54 developed a series of sonic lectures, Sonic Intimacies, inviting various artists, DJs, writers, thinkers and organizers. During three live events (digital and/or physical) perspectives, ideas, histories and experiments animated questions such as: what does it mean to relate to intangible concepts and attitudes such as 'vibe' and 'coolness'? What roles do such (im)material concepts play in cultural and artistic productions and practices? And how come that is expressed within urban arts & culture or society?

Listen to recording from the lecture, broadcast on NTS Radio here

Photos by Francoise Bolechowski

On Listening
Group exhibition at Lothringer 13, Munich (2023)

’A collection of objects, photography and text documenting some of the flora, fauna and geologies of various landscapes, as a means of questioning a multiplicity of spatial experiences, and diasporic locations emerging in different local contexts.

A collaborative sound work that combines the pieces "Blue History" by Ashley Holmes and "Fawns of the City" by artist Otis Mensah surrounds the exhibition space. It explores the many delicate states of home, friendship and faith amidst the noise of disconnected identity. Whilst investigating issues of racial fragmentation, the piece proposes joy-seeking and the pursuit of personal liberation, exploring and reclaiming notions of Blackness.’

Photos by Frank Bauer

Open Deck
Listening Session with Gut Level (2023)

Following the format of the usual series of Open Deck listening sessions, there will be a turntable, mixer, laptop and aux cable, and each person in attendance is invited to share their own choice of music or sound recording that they have a memory, story or association to. You can find a link to a Spotify playlist of previous contributions here.

The session took place at Site Gallery as part of their summer exhibition Wishful Thinking, by Lucie Cordicova and Gregory Herbert in collaboration with Site Gallery’s youth collective The Society of Explorers.

Photos by Shared Programme / Peter Martin

Decaying Tail of a Sound
FACT Liverpool (2023)

’Live event as an outcome of his Jerwood Arts / FACT Fellowship. Centred on musical, theoretical and geographical explorations, the event title makes reference to a section of ‘Echo', a chapter by Julian Henriques and Hillegonda Rietveld from The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies - a volume presenting a comparative and historically informed understanding of the workings of sound in culture.

Artists Ratiba Ayadi and Seigfried Komidashi were invited to share space and present live works that respond to themes of his research into echo, reverberation and notions of temporality and conceptions of place.’

Photos by Rob Battersby

Sonic Walk
Workshop with Arts Catalyst (2022)

Guided walk around the Gleadless Valley, encouraging participants to listen with the landscape and make sound recordings situated within the mix of environments. Through this wayfaring, a mix of questions will be posed, such as how can we experience the local environment and world around us with as little intervention as possible? and how can listening be a space of political encounter?

Recordings from this walk were then edited together to form an original sound composition, Soliloquy Dubs, shared as part of Arts Catalyst’s Changing Currents podcast series. Listen here.

Photos by Sophie Okonkwo

Crucial
Performance at Auto Italia (2022)

‘Auto Italia presents Crucial, a multimedia performance by Ashley Holmes. Exploring music and sound as means for researching collective memory, ownership and belonging. It takes the version and the riddim, iterative musical practices born from Jamaican music, as a framework for surveying sonic materials and technologies.’

Photos by Henry Mills, video documentation by Tommie Introna

Distend
Commission for Yorkshire Sculpture International at Leeds Art Gallery (2021)

Installation expanding on Holmes’ interest in sonic fiction and the deconstructive practices of dub music and remixing to explore cultural memory. The work references the earthquake and landslides that struck Port Royal, Jamaica in 1692, reimagining the submerged landscapes and mythologies, connecting Afrodiasporic aural traditions and the natural world.

Distend  considers the embedded soundings that remain encoded in objects, recordings, architectural spaces, technology and memory – a subterranean excavation voicing body and voicing dread, through and from echoing vessels.

Photos by Peter Martin / Shared Programme

Pending, Still (Sync n Feeling Dub)

Commission for consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean audio program, by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational, UAL Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Culture (2021)

‘For their new audio commissions, artist Ashley Holmes, and artist and writer Ayesha Hameed in conversation with poet and essayist Shivanee Ramlochan, consider the Caribbean’s deep cultural legacies of poetics and music. They journey through sound and spoken word, to explore the reverberations of personal, cultural and ancestral memory. The ocean and landscape as sites of violence are also demonstrated as a form of diasporic and queer possibility; building new subjectivities through language and sonic experiments – what Stuart Hall has described as survival strategies of Caribbean vernacular culture, ‘[...] the underground, subversive, rhythmic ‘rereading’ of an overground, dominant harmonics.’ (Hall, 2003).’

More info here

Even Myself Knows That Too (Journal Dub)

Performance at Frieze London LIVE programme, curated by Languid Hands (2021)

Even Myself Knows That Too (Journal Dub) is a reference to a line from the song ‘Bad to Worse’ released in 1978 by Burning Spear and is a continuation of Ashley Holmes’s current explorations into the language, sound, movement and foundations of Black musical tradition. An ode to his guiding voices, to ancestors, to the legacies of the Blues, of Reggae, Rocksteady and Dub through experiments in space and sound. The performance combines installation, moving image and DJing, navigating disparate but connected geographies across the Black Atlantic through musical encounters with expressions, or acknowledgements, of feelings of sorrow, aspiration, fear, hope, love and dread.

Photos by Deniz Guzel

A Free Moment

Exhibition at Center for Contemporary Art Futura, Prague, Czech Republic
26.2 - 31.5.2020

Double 6

Performance with R.I.P. Germain at former courtroom at Leeds Town Hall
Poor Image Projects 8, Index Festival (2019)

’Unfolding as a one-night performance in the former courtroom of Leeds Town Hall, Double 6 takes conjunctures of race, class and British popular culture to consider the wider political and social value of Black life under the microscope of public courts of opinion. The work utilises the context and architecture of the courtroom to present a combination of textiles, painting, music and performance.

A series of hand-painted banners are displayed around the courtroom, alongside a speaker set-up installed, which plays a montage of music throughout the space that samples and references various musicians, genres and time periods.

Double 6 reflects on linguistic and performative creativity, to explore the combined roles of the canon of Black musical tradition, sports and entertainment in relation to how we understand conceptions of race in the context of a British political and social discourse. The work attempts to rationalise and question economic and social structures of domination, oppression, spectacle and the liberatory potential in cultural production that embodies notions of aspiration, wealth, love and death.’

Good To Us
Video, sound & performance presented as part of group exhibition Survey, by Jerwood Arts.
Exhibition toured to G39, Cardiff; The Bluecoat, Liverpool; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Jerwood Visual Arts, London 2018-19

‘A major new survey exhibition presenting new works by 15 early-career artists from across the UK. Survey is the largest review of contemporary art practice in Jerwood Arts’ history and spans a breadth of disciplines including painting, ceramics, film, performance, podcast, sculpture, drawing and collage.

The exhibition explores a wide range of subjects from family relationships, domestic and gendered roles, climate change and alternative economies, community filmmaking and the political and social climate in the UK, personal narratives of heritage, the effects of digital connectivity and the economies of the art world.

Exhibiting artists: Chris Alton, Simeon Barclay, Hazel Brill, Flo Brooks, Emma Cousin, Joe Fletcher Orr, Tom Goddard, Ashley Holmes, Lindsey Mendick, Nicole Morris, Milly Peck, Anna Raczynski, Will Sheridan Jr, Rae-Yen Song and Frank Wasser.’

A Space For Listening: The Likeness

away, completely: denigrate group exhibition at Narrative Projects, London
with Ebun Sodipo, Ashley Holmes, Halima Haruna and Libita Clayton
curated by Languid Hands

14.11.19 - 01.02.2020

Photo and video documentation by Judita Kuniskyte

All rights reserved © Ashley Holmes 2023