The Deep: Sonic Futurisms and Hyperdimensional Rhythms - Agnes Etherington Art Centre Agnes Etherington Art Centre

Humans observe the deep sea, the deep earth, and deep space, but cannot grasp them. The deep does not belong to us but can be a rich source of inspiration and magic. Music seems to drift from somewhere beyond and can teach us about modes of presence without capture or possession, about better ways of moving, relating and being embedded in this rocky-wet blue-green world. Drift: Art and Dark Matter artists Josèfa Ntjam (Saint-Étienne, France) and Jol Thoms (London, UK) delve into music and mystery. Together they jam their cosmo-sonic studies through the deep’s inklings of dark matters and other beyonds in a live-streamed radio show presented on the Discord platform. Sign up to save your spot in this free program.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the Chancellor Dunning Trust Visitorship.

Jol Thoms, The Bulk: Frameworks (shadow), 2021, slotted steel angle with Fresnel lenses and mirror ball motors. Collection of the artist

Jol Thoms, Isomorphis (redactor) and untitled sculpture, 2020, acrylic-mounted c-print and brass and rock sculpture with rock sourced from Dynamic Earth Sudbury. Collection of the artist

Biographies

Josèfa Ntjam was born in 1992 in Metz (FR), and currently lives and works in Paris. Ntjam is part of a generation of artists who grew up with the internet, communicating and sending images by electromagnetic wave. Working with video, text, installation, performance and photomontage, Ntjam creates a story with every piece that acts as a reflection of the world around her. Drawing connections to science fiction and the cosmos, Ntjam has said of her work, “I sat there some time ago with Sun Ra in his Spaceship experimenting with a series of alternative stories. An exoteric syncretism with which I travel as a vessel in perpetual motion.”

Ntjam studied in Amiens and Dakar (Cheikh Anta Diop University) and graduated from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Bourges (FR) and Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Paris-Cergy (FR). Her works and performance have been shown at numerous venues such as the 15th Biennial of Lyon, DOC! Paris, a la Zentral (CH), Palais de Tokyo, Beton Salon, La Cite internationale des arts, la Bienanale de Dakar (SN), Let Us Reflect Festival (FR), FRAC de Caen, and CAC Bretigny.

Jol Thoms is a Canadian-born, European-based artist, author and sound designer. Both his written and moving-image work engage posthumanism, feminist science studies, general ecology and the environmental implications of pervasive technical/sensing devices. In the fields of neutrino and dark matter physics he collaborates with renowned physics institutes around the world. These “laboratory-landscapes” are the focus of his practice led PhD at the University of Westminster. In 2017 Thoms was a fellow of Schloss Solitude and resident artist at the Bosch Campus for Research and Advanced Engineering.

Thoms graduated with an Honors BA in Philosophy, Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2009) and later studied under Prof. Simon Starling at the Städelschule in Frankfurt (2013). Between 2014 and 2016 he developed and taught an experimental creative-research program for architecture students at the University of Braunschweig with then interim director Tomás Saraceno. In 2016 Thoms won the MERU Art*Science Award for his film G24|0vßß, which was installed in the Blind Faith: Between the Cognitive and the Visceral in Contemporary Art group exhibition at Haus der Kunst, Munich.