Get Up, Stand Up Now
Get Up Stand Up Now x Somerset House Studios
From 12 Jun 2019
Part of Somerset House Studios
Get Up, Stand Up Now is a major new exhibition at Somerset House celebrating the past 50 years of Black creativity in Britain and beyond. The exhibition explores migration, psychological and social borders, the body and participation, power and resistance.
During its run, the Somerset House Studios summer programme will expand on these themes, bringing together artists and creatives whose work comments on what it means to be Black today. Going beyond the representation of Blackness as a "celebration of culture" or as a homogeneous cultural identity, a programme of music, performance, DJs and drag will create space to discuss the sometimes difficult or uncomfortable issues around Black diasporic experiences in relation social and political conditions of their making.
The hope is to bring a broad audience face to face, listening and in dialogue with Black artists, and in doing so, chip away at the collective amnesia fuelled by mainstream media.
These events are open for all to attend.
Black Obsidian Sound System: Club Night
BOSS family and friends on the decks. Good tunes and better vibes.→
An evening of poetry, performances and live music exploring black diasporic identity.→
No Tea, No Shade
Performances that hold a mirror up to society and confronting, head-on, issues that are often treated as 'too difficult' to talk about, through the disarming yet damning use of drag culture.→
12 Jun – 08 Aug 2019
Film Series: This is England
Touching on some of the themes of our Get Up, Stand Up Now exhibition, these films explore the paradoxes of identities that exist between hypervisibility and erasure.→
Dreaming / Diasporas
An evening of talk, performance, live music and DJing, inspired by the dreamlike, fractured nature of the black diasporic identity.→
Mon 08 Jul 2019
Baldwin's Nigger Reloaded II
A workshop and public performance of a re-inscribed script of Horace Ové's Baldwin's Nigger.→
Black Obsidian Sound System: Workshop
A workshop demystifying the technical operation and maintenance of a sound system.→
Black Obsidian Sound System: Immersive Installation
Multi-sensory experience from the BOSS family.→