AGM 2025
AGM returns with a night of performances and installations responding to the rich architecture of Somerset House, unfolding as a series of subterranean encounters exploring themes of concealment, porosity, and alter-egos.
This is an 18+ event.
| Dates | 17 Oct 2025 |
| Times | 7.30pm–11pm |
| Space | The Deadhouse Lightwells Basement New Wing |
| Price | £17 |
This year, Somerset House Studios’ flagship event retreats to the hidden spaces and winding passageways beneath the building. Under the surface, conventions fall away and the boundaries between us dissolve, giving way to moments of transition: journeys, rituals and the precarious relationship between the living and those who have passed. The night unravels through cross-disciplinary works by Paul Maheke with Nenni and Adrian Barstad Andresen, Gray Wielebinski with Manuka Honey and agustine zegers, Jennifer Lauren Martin, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, and Nkisi with invited guests.
Choreographer, dance artist, and somatic researcher Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome activates the labyrinthine architecture of the site with her performance set your ear down, set your mind to the ground. Drawing on the Mesopotamian myth of Inanna’s descent to the underworld, Muñoz-Newsome combines voice, movement and echoing sound.
image credit: Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, The Roberts Institute of Art. Photographer: Anne Tetzlaff
Paul Maheke’s meditative performance The Origin of Death, with musicians Nenni and Adrian Barstad Andresen, explores interconnectedness and the dialogue between dance, sound, and identity. Utilising science fiction tropes, found and written texts, sketches, music and movement, the performance hinges on alienation from others and the border between life and death.
Jennifer Lauren Martin builds upon her performance and soundscape Relations in the Ditch, considering the grief of broken friendships. Martin stages a heated argument between three friends, navigating issues of betrayal and co-dependence.
image credit: Manuka Honey, courtesy of artist
Gray Wielebinski, Manuka Honey, and agustine zegers collaborate on a new performance interrogating how cheerleading, a symbol of hyper-femininity and American patriotic ritual, might be made subcultural. Evoking the haunting Texas landscape from Gray Wielebinski and Manuka Honey’s childhoods, the work reflects on the twilight of the American empire, queering mainstream culture and tradition.
Musician and producer Nkisi programmes a series of sound collages, inviting artists Solomon Garçon, Francesca Heart, and Aeson Zervas to contribute audio alongside her own mix. The collages will form part of an audio-visual installation, played throughout the evening.
Artists In Residence
Biographies
Paul Maheke
Paul Maheke lives and works in Montpellier. Through various artistic forms and disciplines, Maheke has undertaken a sustained exploration of the ways marginalized bodies, narratives, and histories are rendered visible and invisible. Resisting an approach to identity that remains confined within the framework of identity politics, Maheke’s practice is channeled through spectral sensations. The artist calls upon ghosts, spirits, and non-human entities in their works to encourage a reorientation of perception, inviting audiences to reconsider how they see, feel, and listen.
In reconfiguring the sensible, Maheke seeks to disrupt dominant systems of discourse that prioritize representation, visibility, and legibility as ultimate markers of truth, value, and power. Instead, the artist cultivates a self in a state of in-betweenness—where esoteric, spiritual, queer, and embodied knowledge(s) create potential for prophecy.
His work has been shown at Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London, the Venice Biennale, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, The Renaissance Society, Chicago, Mercer Union, Toronto, Performa, New York, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Bourse de Commerce - Collection Pinault and Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, MO.CO, Montpellier, Triangle France, Marseille, Baltic Triennial 13, Manifesta 12, Palerme, Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, Chisenhale Gallery and The South London Gallery, London, among others.
Paul Maheke is the recipient of the 25th Fondation Pernod Ricard Prize and will be a fellow at the Villa Medici – French Academy in Rome for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Nenni
Nenni is a singer-songwriter based in the South of France. In Nenni's world, emotions dominate everything. Sensitivity reigns supreme and is expressed in full HD through every pore of her voice. For this former dancer, who began self-taught music at the age of 18 following a bad injury, artistic expression has always played the therapeutic role of a powerful outlet. She is inspired by intrinsically grandiloquent musical languages such as gospel and RnB but for Nenni singing is less a performance than a quest for emotional and cathartic truth, a collective healing enterprise. She has been an open act for various artists including Charlie Winston, Keziah Jones, Anthony Joseph and Blick Bassy.
Adrian Barstad Andresen
Adrian Barstad Andresen is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser based in Oslo. With a background in jazz trumpet and the traditional Norwegian goat horn, he explores the intersection between contemporary artistic expression and the roots of his Scandinavian heritage.
His practice often bridges music, movement, and live visual art, seeking to expand the sensory experience for both audience and performer. Drawing on a wide range of folk instruments from around the world, Adrian's latest work IMAGINED combines tradition with a contemporary framework of composition and improvisation—balancing rawness and beauty with a deep sense of cultural respect.
Adrian has performed at renowned venues across Europe, including Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene and the Astrup Fearnley Museum (Oslo), Kulturtemplet (Gothenburg), Metronomen (Copenhagen), Sala Negra Teatro (Logroño), La Cinémathèque de Toulouse, and The Portico (London), among others. In addition to presenting his own works and compositions, his music has also been performed by prominent ensembles such as the Norwegian Radio Orchestra (KORK) and the Norwegian Wind Ensemble (DNBE).
Manuka Honey
Bringing chaos, sensuality and ecstatic motion to her productions and selections, Manuka Honey circles club music's most compelling fringes. In just a few short years, she's cultivated an idiosyncratic sound that's shuttled her from continent to continent, assembling a tight catalog of EPs, remixes and singles that harness the energy of Latin-American and Caribbean dance sounds, infusing it into radical new structures. A DJ, producer, multi-disciplinary artist and professional astrologer, Marissa Malik was born and raised in the US before she relocated to London, bringing her hot, humid aura to rainy England. She's animated by the complex alchemy of the dancefloor, and as likely to reference experimental sounds as she is cumbia or dembow.
Francesca Heart
Francesca Heart is a Milan-based artist working across sound, movement, installation, and somatic research. With volcanic and marine roots in Southern Italy, her practice emerges at as an interdisciplinary research on hydrofeminism, mythological acoustics, and landscape choreology. Her acclaimed albums Eurybia and Sphinx Nouvelle are released on Leaving Records and have received praise from Pitchfork, Vogue Italia, Bandcamp Daily, and others for their Elysian sensibility and imaginary fusion of electronic, ceremonial, and classical synthesizer forms.
She investigates how bodies- human, more-than-human, geological- carry memory, myth, and transformation. Her work is driven by the belief that listening is a radical tool for reconfiguring our relationship with the earth and the cosmos. Through sonic explorations, choreographic scores and educational formats, she mainly focuses on the Mediterranean as a resonant body, a space of stratified histories, mythological echoes and post-human futures.
Francesca has collaborated with artists Kamasi Washington, Carlos Niño, Saul Williams, Eric Christison, Vica Pacheco and more. She has presented her work across various institutions and festivals including Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Museo MADRE, C2C Festival, MAO Torino, CTM Festival, Rewire Festival, Nextones, VIDEOCITTÀ and has collaborated with Balenciaga, Maison Margiela, Dolce & Gabbana and more.
agustine zegers
agustine (ah-goos-teen) is a Chilean olfactory artist and student of molecular biopolitics. Their work attends to the complex transcorporealities we share as inhabitants of Earth, offering gassly becomings to navigate a planet in transition. Their work has scented and been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Venice Biennale, Galería Jaqueline Martins, Sharjah Art Foundation, 52 Walker, and Prairie. They currently live on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: The Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations, colonially known as Chicago, IL.
Aeson Zervas
TBC
Solomon Garçon
TBC
Header image:
Paul Maheke The Origin of Death - Performance © Astrup Fearnley Museet, 2023. Photographer: Jan Khur