Event
Somerset House Studios

AGM 2023

Fri 13 Oct 2023
19.00 - 23.00
£15.00
New Wing

Somerset House Studios celebrates its resident artist community with AGM, an unmissable annual night of collaborative energy, installations and performances.

For AGM 2023, the Studios have invited three guest curators to each host different spaces across the ground floor of Somerset House’s New Wing - Studios residents Joe Namy and Akinola Davies, plus interdisciplinary artist Rosa-Johan Uddoh. AGM also offers audiences late night access to Sonya Dyer’s River Rooms installation Three Parent Child.  

Artist and composer Joe Namy presents Disguise as Dancefloor in the Lancaster Rooms, inviting collaborators to come together on a custom, copper-tiled dancefloor for a series of four improvised performances, paring guest DJs Cõvco, Ain Bailey, Nihal El Aasar and Paul Purgas with movement artists Malik Nashad Sharpe, Alexandrina Hemsley (Yewande 103), Dove and Hannah Hernandez. A “super-charged platform”, Disguise as Dancefloor reflects Namy’s influences: the wide range of experiences that unfold on the dancefloor, the subversive politics of bass, and the effects of sound on the body, including healing properties and other alchemical resonances.

In the intimate G30 space, writer, director and moving image artist Akinola Davies has invited James Massiah, percussionists Edward Wakili-Hick and Ursula Holliday, and multidisciplinary collective LA CREOLE for an evening of music, spoken word and live drums in dialogue.

Artist and performer Rosa-Johan Uddoh presents Ye Olde Performance: An Audience With The Horrid Sisters, a three-act live performance with collaborators Shola von Reinhold and Thandi Loewenson in G16.

This is an 18+ event 

Joe Namy


Joe Namy is an artist, composer, and educator who often works collaboratively through intersections of sound, video, performance and sculpture. Their projects often focus on the politics of music and organised sound, such as the pageantry and power of opera, noise laws and the gender dynamics of bass, the colours and tones of militarisation, the migration patterns of instruments and songs, and the complexities of translation in all this - from language to language, score to sound, from drum to dance. Joe hosts a monthly DJ residency Rhythm x Rhythm on Radio Alhara, is a Sundance/Time Studios Kendeda Fellow and a PHD researcher at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

Akinola Davies

Akinola Davies is a BAFTA nominated and Sundance award-winning writer, director and moving image artist. His work is situated between West Africa and the UK as he identifies as a member of the global diaspora who is situated within the margins of being part of both worlds. His work tries to delicately navigate the collision of both colonial and imperial tradition, and more importantly a return to indigenous narratives.

Exploring themes of community, race, spirituality, identity and gender, Davies' work tells stories that bridge the gap between traditional and millennial communities. These themes come with a duality: that of necessity and urgency in regards to the medium of storytelling.

Rosa-Johan Uddoh

Rosa-Johan Uddoh is an interdisciplinary artist working towards radical self-love and is inspired by Black feminist practice and writing. Through performance, writing and multi-media installation, she explores places, objects and celebrities in British popular culture, as well as their effects on self-formation. Collaboration is key to Rosa's work, and she often works with children, activists and other artists to explore themes that impact our communities and share knowledge. 

Rosa’s recent solo presentations include: Una's Voice, The Bower, Pink Tongue Brown Cheek, Iniva (both London, 2022), Practice Makes Perfect, Focal Point Gallery (Southend-on-Sea, 2021), She is still alive!, Destiny’s (Oslo, 2020), Studies for Impartiality, Jupiter Woods and Sphinx at the Crystal Palace, Black Tower Projects (both London, 2019).