Trade Winds is the first live performance in London by the US-based artist, poet and composer JJJJJerome Ellis, devised for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Using spoken word and live music that combines saxophone, piano, hammer dulcimer and electronics, Ellis creates captivating improvisational sonic landscapes known as ‘clearings.’
‘Clearings’, spaces Ellis forms through stuttering or ‘dysfluency’, challenge relationships between Blackness, speech, music and time. According to Ellis, opening up time points toward possibilities of refusal and dissent.
Ellis’s performance takes shape in two halves. The first presents portions from Ellis’s ongoing bodies of work The Clearing 2021 and Aster of Ceremonies 2023. The second presents a newly created musical work titled A Response, In Admiration, to El Anatsui’s Behind the Red Moon 2024. This work is inspired by Ellis’s time spent with El Anatsui’s Hyundai Commission.
Located on the Turbine Hall Bridge and surrounded by Anatsui’s work, Ellis's performance will connect with the stories of power, oppression and resilience explored within the commission.
Trade Winds is the first part of a two-night programme titled Voice and Breath, which presents contemporary artistic practices working at the intersection of performance, poetry and music.
This performance is relaxed.
The second night of the programme is a performance by writer, poet and artist Olivia Douglass on 9 March.
This event is organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational.
