MASS : Live performance by GAIKA in collaboration with Ben Cullen Williams

Join us for the opening of MASS with live performance by GAIKA

Staffordshire St presents an audio visual installation by Gaika and Ben Cullen Williams. For MASS Gaika and Williams intend to build on the relationship between cinematic, sculptural and performative within their work. Both Gaika and Williams are from London and grew up enmeshed in London’s club culture. They have, however, seen these spaces slip away, being closed down due to a number of factors including economics and urban development. Through sculpture, video, light and sound, the new installation will exist as an active site at the intersection of club culture and urban development, sitting on a line between destruction and creation, death and rebirth.

Gaika and Williams have collaborated previously on projects such as Now Gallery in Greenwich where they created an electro-acoustic instrument that was played via an algorithmic sequencer scoring a video work live in real time. While recently in Sicily at art and music festival Picnic Affair, they floated a raft made of stage truss on the Ionian Sea, fitted with two strobe lights the work responded to the frequencies of a musical score.

Gaika, an enigmatic, multidisciplinary artist. Emerging from the electronic music underground, he draws directly on his Afro Caribbean heritage and his experience of navigating the built environment across the world's mega megacities. His politically charged views of urbanised , mechanised and mediatised living are expressed as total artworks that combine large scale spatial and architectural aspects with music and video and performance. His works are largely considerations of psychogeography, morality, technology, memory, and emotion. Aiming for people to get truly lost in the worlds he builds, and for that journeying to trigger internal investigations beyond the moment of encounter.

Williams explores humankind’s relationship to the world in a rapidly changing environment; he focuses on the intersection between space, technology and landscape. His work fluidly moves between sculptures, installations, photography and video. He investigates how related spatial typologies can be understood as a physical manifestation of our own human condition. While showing his work across a spectrum of spaces internationally from museums and galleries, to theatres to public spaces. As a keen advocate of cross conversations between disciplines, collaboration is an integral part of his practice. He has travelled to the Antarctic with polar Explorer Robert Swan from which he presented a video work at Somerset House on which Gaika created the score, collaborated with Royal Ballet resident choreographer Wayne McGregor and developed work with Google Arts and Culture Lab.

Accessibility: There is step-free access to the gallery via the door to the left hand side of the main entrance. There is a wheelchair accessible toilet. The event will be taking place in the exhibition space, which is a large open room with bright lighting and some seating available.

Staffordshire St is an independent project space in Peckham, South East London. The venue facilitates arts and cultural events and provides affordable studios for artists, makers and designers. ​

Staffordshire St is not-for-profit and all income is invested into developing our public programme which launched the summer of 2022. The venue was established as an art gallery in 2017, before then it was vacant for many years after a community centre closed. Originally it was built as a Methodist Hall. We intend to support a range of cultural events for the local community.

Staffordshire St will build on the established record of these histories, opening up again to the neighbourhood and developing a welcoming interdisciplinary arts space. More information on upcoming events at : info@staffordshirest.com or @staffordshirest

For any upcoming opportunities, please sign up to our newsletter here.