Tuesday 6 January 2026, 7.30pm
(music first): pre echo(ic) memory moves memory space (inputs) imagined, open (looser), music (first, then), film: Black Atlas
crystabel riley, seymour wright, edward george,
Black Atlas @ cafe Oto
Black Atlas was made during a year-long residency at the Warburg where George worked closely with the Image of the Black archive, a collection of over 30,000 photographs of artworks, artefacts and objects that feature figures of African descent. This collection was started in 1960 by Dominique and Jean de Ménil and was given to the Institute in the late 1990s.
Black Atlas marks the first time that the Warburg Institute has commissioned a contemporary artwork. The film will enter the Institute’s collection after the exhibition’s close, held as part of its Special Collections. George’s project inaugurates a running initiative to commission contemporary artworks and exhibitions to activate and interrogate the Institute’s collections.
George has assembled a 57-minute film comprised entirely of photographs from the archive. Broken into nine chapters of recurring images – dogs, blood, sex, monkeys, mirrors, collars, faces, space, and things – each section represents a constellation of meanings and images that leapt out during George’s research. In these iconographic groupings, George presents audiences with an archival methodology: one that is simultaneously lucid and uncanny, playful and scholarly. Across an analytical journey, the film both assembles and disassembles these recurrent tropes, for George to ask who is being represented, by whom, and how the archive might begin to warp our perception of time and representation itself.
In his distinctive formal approach blending cultural criticism with storytelling, present in his work in the Black Audio Film Collective (famously in The Last Angel of History (1995)), George has written a narration to the film, overlaid above an original soundtrack of improvised sounds made in response to the images by Crystabel Riley and Seymour Wright. In his script, George explicitly converses with figures from the collection, presenting a clear shift where his narration is no longer representative of himself but instead becoming an intermediary, a medium through which the figures in the archive can speak as subjects rather than objects. George sometimes refers to “The Black Atlas” – the psychological landscape that emerged for him in the process of looking, the environment or time that carries and connects the people, signs, moods and actions captured across the collection.
https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/edward-george-black-atlas
Edward George is a writer and broadcaster. Founder of Black Audio Film Collective, George wrote and presented the ground-breaking science fiction documentary Last Angel of History (1996). George is part of the multimedia duo Flow Motion, and the electronic music group Hallucinator. He and hosts Sound of Music (Threads Radio), Kuduro – Electronic Music of Angola (Counterflows). George’s series The Strangeness of Dub (Morley Radio) dives into reggae, dub, versions and versioning, drawing on critical theory, social history, and a deep and a wide cross-genre musical selection. Edward George lives and works in London.
During the late noughties Crystabel Efemena Riley toured Japan and Europe using drums, electronics and make-up in power-noise trio Maria and the Mirrors. This was the start of her interest in patterns on skins — human and drum. An interest in dimensional patterns existing on (and off) different surfaces has continued to evolve through exploring the idea of 'care and uncare' of various skin surfaces. Crystabel has been a long-term collaborator with Sue Lynch who welcomed her into the Horse Improvised Music Club and later played in the London Improvisers Orchestra. She is currently working on the multi-format duo project @xcrswx with Seymour Wright and recently released a split vinyl with Lolina.
Seymour Wright is a saxophonist. His work is about the creative, situated friction of learning, ideas, people and the saxophone – music, history and technique – actual and potential.
Seymour's solo music is documented on three widely-acclaimed collections - Seymour Wright of Derby (2008), Seymour Writes Back (2015) and Is This Right? (2017).
Current projects include: @xcrswx with Crystabel Riley; abaria with Ute Kanngiesser; [Ahmed] with Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip and Pat Thomas; GUO with Daniel Blumberg; XT with Paul Abbott; The Creaking Breeze Ensemble; a trans-atlantic duet with Andy Guthrie, and, with Jean-luc Guionnet a project addressing an imaginary lacunae in Aby Warburg's Atlas Mnemosyne.
@xcrswx
