Somerset House Studios 2020 Round-Up

2020 has been a strange and difficult year, with many artists and creatives facing major challenges to their livelihoods and their ability to share work with audiences in traditional ways. Despite this, there have been many things worth celebrating, and we couldn’t let it go unmarked – there are some things worth celebrating. Here, we spotlight the Studios community by rounding up a selection of artists’ work and achievements from the last twelve months for you to read, watch, listen.  

Listen: Paul Purgas’ Electronic India

At the tail-end of this year Paul Purgas’ exhibition and events programme We Found Our Own Reality opened at Camden Art Centre. Bringing together architecture, furniture, textiles and sound, Purgas explored India’s first electronic music studio, founded in 1969. He investigates the lost history of India’s electronic avant-garde on Electronic India, a radio feature originally broadcast on BBC Radio 3. 

Read: Sonya Dyer on a practice centring Black female subjectivities and futurity

In October the Arts Foundation Futures Award, celebrating emerging artists, selected Sonya Dyer as one of four finalists for their 2021 Fellowship (to be announced in January 2021). In this interview curator Jareh Des spoke with Sonya, discussing working in a pandemic and her long-term project Hailing Frequencies Open, which in part featured in our I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now… Live programme earlier this year. 

Sonya-Dyer-Hailing-Frequencies-Open-Dr-Chanda-Prescod-Weinstein-2019-1024x640.jpg

Sonya Dyer, Hailing Frequencies Open: Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, 2019. Video still.

Read: Akinola Davies Jr’s Lizard reviewed by gal-dem

Featured at this year’s London Film Festival was Akinola Davies Jr.’s Lizard, a short film longlisted for Best British Short Film. The film sees Juwon, an 8-year-old girl with an ability to sense danger, ejected from Sunday school service in this vivid snapshot of Nigerian life. You can catch the film in full next year as part of Sundance Film Festival’s official selection, online. Read gal-dem’s Kemi Alemoru review the film below.

Read: Q&A with Imran Perretta, winner of a Turner Prize bursary

London-based artist Imran Perretta was commended for his film the destructors (2019) by this year’s Turner Prize jury. The film is a personal reflection on South Asian men from Muslim backgrounds ‘coming of age’ in the UK. In this Q&A with The Art Newspaper he discusses the destructors and the influences that inform his work.

Listen: Gaika’s latest record Seguridad

Gaika’s latest album Seguridad was made with Mexico City collective NAAFI and released in July. In this review by The Quietus’ Michael Appouh describes the album as an ‘impressive and transportive listen’. Alongside GLOR1A, Shannen SP and Zara Truss-Giles, Gaika’s The Spectacular Empire also launched Nine Nights, an initiative that raised funds for UK and US black-focused charities through a series of live streams celebrating Black culture. 

Read: The Reason I Jump film review via Variety; Nick Ryan nominated for Best Sound

Nick Ryan, the award-winning composer, sound designer, artist and audio specialist was this year nominated for a British Independent Film Award for Best Sound, for his work on Jerry Rothwell’s documentary The Reason I Jump. The film is an account of living with autism, ‘emotionally piercing as it is beautiful to behold’.

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