Boundary Condition: Haedong Lee & Yidan Kim + Dirar Kalash & Cerpintxt + Beachers

This edition of Boundary Condition features 6 artists in a hybrid of audiovisual live sets & immersive projections; oblique ceremonial forms, xenofeminism, ancient rituals, olfactory imagery, sonic resistance, counter hegemony, machinic desire, shamanic practices, uncertain futures, queer politics, ancestral memory, distorted textures, folk remnants, cassette collages, subtractive synthesis, climate grief, and a replica fox-hunting horn in a historic 12th century church. Full programme TBA Haedong Lee & Yidan Kim present Ecology of Death and Annihilation: A Ceremony for Things that Wither 죽음과 소멸의 생태계 : 사라지는 것들을 위한 세레모니 Rooted in diverse ritual cultures from across the world, Haedong Lee and Yidan Kim's latest work is presented as a contemporary ceremony, a multi-disciplinary performance that pulls together various elements from the duo’s rigorous study of various ceremonial practices across East Asia and the wider Asian continent, and shamanic cultures found in West Africa and throughout Europe. Ringing various bells Lee has collected or created, playing wooden and metal percussive instruments used in rituals that span different cultures, chanting and overlaying hallucinatory synthesized and processed sounds, the two artists create a uniquely contemporary interpretation of ritual soundscapes, braiding remnants of folk songs with oblique ceremonial forms. They complement their meticulously engineered sonic ecosystem with physical actions and olfactory expressions that are harder to perceive on record, such as the gestures involved in the offering of incense and the materials that have historically been used in rituals and ceremonies. Scouring history, Kim creates a layered smell-scape from plant resins, leaves and bark like frankincense, agarwood and sage that diffuses as the performance unfolds. Born in South Korea and currently based in London, Lee and Kim are both seasoned interdisciplinary artists, with Lee concentrating his interest on sound and Kim primarily working with smell. And for almost a decade, their work has overlapped repeatedly as they have developed a way to harmonize their respective skills, exploring the history of ritual, ceremonial and multi-sensory experiences by merging installation and performance. Kim's interests took them to the Korean Traditional Incense Cultural Association, where they received a formal training in incense ceremony, allowing them to refine their approach to olfactory imagery. Lee meanwhile spent time imagining sound sculptures with metal, wood and the by-products of the Anthropocene, objects that allow him to reflect on ecological and civilizational crises while practicing restraint and control. 'Ecology of Death and Annihilation: A Ceremony for Things that Wither' first emerged in 2021, when it was debuted at Seoul's Oil Tank Culture Park, and it stretches Lee and Kim's art through the past and present and far into the future. Hypothesizing art itself is itself an ancient ritual, the performance establishes itself as a contemporary hybrid, where sounds, movements and smells mimic each others' temporal motions, appearing and disappearing to provoke consciousness itself. Gisou Golshani & Helin Karabil present Duaye Khaar دعای خار ‘Duaye Khaar’ (Prayer of the Thorn) is a textural imagining of uncertain futures, frustrated species and harsh landscapes. Inspired by Alhagi maurorum, a thorny desert shrub found on a road trip through northeastern Iran, channeling climate grief through elemental relations — salt, water, wind. Gisou Golshani is a London-based artist, performing rituals of belonging and resistance through sound, performance and installation. Her performances blend folk mythology with grief practices from Iran to create intimate temporal environments. In her sonic palette, distorted textures, drones and field recordings merge with vocalisation to summon a surge against erasure. She experiments with storytelling modalities to reflect on feelings of doom and despair, while searching for possibilities of transformation and collective healing. Helin Karabil is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose work maintains and re-presents marginalised cultural histories with an interest in queer Middle Eastern identities. Engaging with digital media, sound, performance, and memory, they create live archives and immersive environments that safeguard endangered identities, counter hegemony, and embody erased histories, particularly in the Middle East. Using software like TouchDesigner, Karabil generates visuals in which ancestral memory, displacement, and queer presence coexist. Beachers presents Horns of Death Beachers is the project of London-based Daryl Worthington. He works in the crossovers between accidental and composed sounds, hi and lo-fi audio, with a particular interest in the beauty of the mundane. This takes an array of approaches, from explorations of the materiality and tactility of radio signals through to analogue synthesis, field recording and cassette collages and sample-based computer music. Beachers releases have appeared on czaszka (rec.), Shimmering Moods, Fractal Meat, Wabi-Sabi Tapes and his own ineffectual suns label. His latest release, ‘Horns Of Death’ (ineffectual suns, 2025) explores a replica fox-hunting horn, processing and twisting its rattles, squeaks and blasts through computer and sampler. Ruben Ruben Sonnoli, performing simply as Ruben, is an Italian musician and producer based in London. With a background in jazz piano and composition for film, Ruben draws inspiration from neoclassical, jazz, and experimental electronic music. His work fuses harmony, melody, sound design, and real-world sound recordings, exploring their mutual interaction and the possibilities of interlacing disparate sonic forms and disrupting the conventional boundaries of “compatible” and “intrusive” sounds. This focus on blending varied elements has also led him to work on projects that combine sound and other media, such as dance and visual art. Ruben’s performances incorporate processed samples, subtractive synthesis, and live instruments, shaping musical environments where moving harmonies and evocative melodies mesh with sonic textures in a delicate balance between cohesion and discord. Boundary Condition is a series of site-responsive, durational events investigating parallels between dark-jazz, hauntology, and music concrete as nostalgia-centric practices, trickling from the persistence and antagonistic fragmentation of certain memories. The project deploys a practice-as-research model of discoursing phenomenology of the various archetypes of atrophy through psychoacoustic, audible interdependence, and sombre studies on degradation, memory, and the politics of time.