Olukemi Lijadu: Feedback

When I enter Olukemi Lijadu’s exhibition Feedback at Spike Island, mid-way through the film that forms its core, and look up to face the screen, I’m met by a band of five percussionists dressed in vivid red Agbada robes, standing in a line along the Badagry beach on the south-west coast of Nigeria. The group, revealed by the exhibition text as the Wura Samba Ensemble, deliver a blistering percussive salvo of syncopated polyrhythms before the screen hard-cuts to momentary blackness. One of their members plays the Dùndún, also known as the ‘talking drum’, an hourglass shaped West African instrument that can imitate human speech through modulations in pitch. Traditionally used to communicate between distant communities, the instrument appears here as both medium and message. In Lijadu’s film, rhythm becomes a carrier that transmits an evolving cultural genealogy across oceans and generations.

Lagos, Chicago,
Detroit, Bristol,
Taken, moved,
Migrated, returned,
African time is 
Somewhere outside of
The past and the future… *
­
At the centre of Feedback is an investigation of how West African sonic traditions survive displacement, although this inquiry is less posed directly than sustained implicitly across its fifteen minute duration. Lijadu draws on Paul Gilroy’s account of the Black Atlantic as a formation produced through forced movement across the sea, but the film resists the academic tendency to stabilise diaspora into theory. Instead, an aural history emerges through sensation. Percussive rhythms, recorded conversations, snatches of songs, and camcorder footage drift in and out of one another without settling into documentary coherence. The effect resembles listening to a stochastic succession of radio frequencies, each transmission bleeding into the next.

The title refers to the electronic phenomenon in which a signal loops back and amplifies through a system, distorting and becoming unstable. It also describes the recursive cultural logic that the film continually returns to, in which sonic forms circulate outward only to come back altered. Musical traditions originating in West Africa reappear within gospel, jazz and early electronic music, then circulate back again through house, hip-hop, and jungle, mutating into new musical terrains with each passing arc of the loop. As the film begins again, a melodic sample scores an array of filmic fragments which bisect the screen: an aerial view of a band spread out in a circle; camcorder footage of a young skater spinning on the ice; a percussionist performing against a coastal horizon. The soundtrack shifts between sources, giving way to the restless strains of breakbeat one second, rewinding into oceanic ambience the next. 

Throughout the film, communication takes place through vibration, repetition, and rhythmic variation rather than through narrative continuity. This emphasis on recurrence gives Feedback its unusual temporal structure. The film flits constantly between archival recordings and contemporary encounters. Footage captured by Lijadu over the last two decades on a handheld camcorder appears alongside newly shot material. Archival samples also feature, often without meaningful distinction, merging the artist’s personal archive with documentary footage. At one point, Lijadu sits listening to music with her father before a stack of speakers whose angular arrangement resembles a kind of altar for audiophiles. Sound systems, like the two speakers stacks provided by Bristol collective Ramsham Hi-Fi which flank the projector screen, become portals or thresholds to different techno-sonic frontiers.

Accordingly, Lijadu’s interest in rhythm extends beyond music into metaphysics. The film is informed by Ifá cosmology and the Yoruba principle of complementary dualism, a philosophy that understands reality as constituted through interrelation rather than separation. Within Ifá thought, consciousness is not restricted to the human subject. All things carry Ori, a form of inner presence that connects material existence to dimensions that are not immediately visible. Feedback approaches sound through this cosmological framework, revealing rhythm as a force capable of connecting and transmuting bodies across time and space.

This idea surfaces most clearly in the film’s accounts of possession and ecstatic listening. Camille Gallogly Bacon’s accompanying exhibition text describes electronic music as a ‘technology of surrender’ a phrase that illuminates the film’s recurring interest in states where the self becomes permeable. One sequence centres on Chicago DJ Duane Powell, who reflects on the spiritual dimensions of dance music culture in the city. Describing the experience of a swooning audience member who ‘caught the holy ghost’, his account positions house music within a longer transcendental Black musical continuum extending through gospel. Other testimonies from DJs, musicians, and party-goers go on to describe moments in which rhythm appears to overtake conscious thought. I too found myself closing my eyes at times during my second full play-through, submitting to the joyful intricacies of the score.

Indeed, in one sequence, images recede almost entirely. The screen fills with punctuations marking beats across a musical bar. As the rhythm develops, the dots begin to pulse, dance and expand until they resemble stars flickering in a constellation-strewn sky. Referencing Rhythmus 21 (1921), Hans Richter’s early avant-garde attempt to disrupt the stable geometry of cinematic space through rhythmic motion, Lijadu extends this logic into a less fixed, more elastic register in which the screen becomes a surface animated by sound itself.

The exhibition is also particularly attentive to Britain’s position within networks of sonic circulation. While discussions of Black electronic music often focus on Chicago or Detroit, Lijadu foregrounds Bristol as a crucial site within the development of house music in the UK during the 1980s. Early Bristolian DJ crews played soul, hip-hop, and house in abandoned venues using sound systems inherited from the city’s reggae scene. As a musical melting pot that would go on to innovate in trip-hop and drum and bass, Bristol emerges not as a peripheral location imitating American innovation but as a distinct node within a wider Atlantic matrix of auditory exchange.

Kodwo Eshun’s concept of sonic fiction hovers over much of the work, particularly in the way Lijadu treats sound as a speculative medium capable of generating alternate historical consciousness. Yet the film remains grounded in material experience. Archival research is interwoven with scenes of travel, family conversation, live performance, and communal listening. Lijadu describes herself as ‘a child of the Atlantic,’ referring to her Jamaican maternal lineage and her paternal family’s movement from Brazil back to Nigeria. Feedback mirrors this inheritance formally. The film itself feels assembled from fragments that never fully resolve into stable ground, but rather exist in movement and interrelation.

A week before my visit, Lijadu performed a DJ set within the installation itself. Positioned behind the projection screen so that her silhouette remained visible through the gauze, she remixed the film’s sonic and visual material in real time. The gesture clarified something essential about Feedback. The exhibition is not concerned with the recovery of a fixed cultural past. Instead, it understands West African musical traditions as living processes continually reinterpreted through collective experience. The feedback loop of the title refers not only to electronic sound but to these histories and forces themselves: a circulation of signals moving between continents, peoples, and generations, never returning in quite the same form.

* Extract of an untitled poem by Olukemi Lijadu.

Elliott Higgs, CAS Curator of Digital

Olukemi Lijadu: Feedback
Spike Island
31 Jan – 10 May 2026
133 Cumberland Road, Bristol, BS1 6UX