This week's Hot List has you covered with everything from experimental music to life drawing and fetish clubs. We've listed all you need and more to keep your next few weeks filled with intriguing events and activities.
DANCE
MUFUTAU YUSUF: IMPASSE
LILIAN BAYLIS STUDIO
Angel I 14 and 15 November 20:00
Impasse is a physical exploration into the diasporic experience, particularly the Black African diaspora. It questions what it means to be a diasporic entity, how you inhabit spaces in which your existence is not clearly marked, and how memory becomes critical to your identity. It’s also an attempt to understand the nuances and complexities around the autonomy of Black bodies, in and out of western space.
Tickets are running low, so be quick and get yours here.
EXHIBITION OPENING PARTY
ALEXANDRIA'S GENESIS BY DIAN JOY
AREBYTE
Canningtown I 14 November 18:30-21:00 (Exhibition continues until 12 January)
Alexandria’s Genesis is a study of how ideas spread in the digital age. British-Nigerian interdisciplinary artist and educator Dian Joy's work reveals how the myth and similar viral phenomena mutate to survive within algorithmic systems. What began as a fanfiction evolves into a viral meme, propelled by the internet. In this exhibition Dian invites us to consider how digital content reflects our desires and serves as a disciplinary force — policing how we see ourselves and exist within these systems. Approaching a viral myth as a hyper-referential text — a meme that mutates and replicates — Dian fills the gallery with its persuasive logic, roaming from screen to screen, creating an entangled web of deceit, desire, and fantasy. By pushing the myth to new extremes, she exposes the persistent logic of whiteness beneath the fantasy of genetic perfection— a fiction that refuses to quit.
Find out more and reserve free tickets to the opening party here.
POETRY READING & MUSIC
ADULT ENTERTAINMENT
THE HAGGERSTON PUB
Haggerston I 14 November 20:00
Adult Entertainment is a poetry night run by James Massiah, a poet and musician from South London whose work explores ideas about sexuality, mortality and hedonism through performance, writing and visual media. The night features poets and guests from various creative disciplines reciting their work. The event is free but has limited capacity, so get down early.
More information here.
PERFORMANCE & DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES
DIGITAL BODY FESTIVAL
HACKNEY BRIDGE
Hackney Wick I 15 to 17 November
Developments in digital technologies are enabling wildly new forms of physical experience and exploding the possible forms the moving body can take, opening up exciting possibilities for artists and audiences. Reaching across multiple art forms, including dance, music, fashion and architecture, a new frontier of creative expression has emerged, which demands a radically different kind of stage. Digital Body Festival will provide the platform for world-class artists, thinkers and emerging talent to showcase work across multiple digital formats that invites the public to move and explore physical creativity in all its forms. Drawing many amazing examples of this work together in one place, it will reveal an exciting new frontier of physicality and bodily expression. Set across a series of spaces within one of East London’s most dynamic cultural and community hubs, the festival will feature exhibition spaces, performances, workshops and live conversations.
Find more information, the programme, and tickets here.
Left: Fragile Memories by Irina Angles and Dr Formalyst | Right: Zizi in Motion A Deepfake Drag Utopia by Jake Elwes
SEX POSITIVE
KLUB VERBOTEN X EARTH
EARTH
Dalston Kingsland I 16 November 21:30-03:30
Launched in 2016, Klub Verboten is a fetish and BDSM community and members club, and a provider of contemporary pro-pervert spaces. They're a grassroots movement bound by modern human interaction and dedicated to the spatial, sonic and visual understanding of future BDSM / fetish practises and culture. If you're interested in attending, make sure to read and pay close attention to all their information and rules. If you do not fully understand why comprehending and adhering to all their Klub Rules is of ultra importance at all times, then this space is not for you.
Read more and get tickets here.
EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC
EVICSHEN – TWO-DAY RESIDENCY
CAFE OTO
Dalston I 16-17 November 19:30
Evicshen is the nom de guerre of sound artist, experimental music performer, and inventor Victoria Shen (she/her). Based in San Francisco, Shen's sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Shen's music eschews conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones.
Find more information and purchase your tickets here.
LIFE DRAWING
FLUX PROJECTS : MOVEMENT LIFE DRAWING
STUDIO WAYNE MCGREGOR
Stratford I 17 November 11:00
The artist-led gallery and multidisciplinary collective Flux Projects is putting on a two-hour life drawing class focused on movement, with guided exercises to get your creative juices flowing. The host Laura Rose Moran-Morris, co-founder of Breakfast Bodies, will be on hand to offer support and advice throughout. Taking place at Studio Wayne McGregor, this workshop will be modelled by Ella Pileggi who will be sharing her practice and throwing exciting and beautiful shapes for you to capture, accompanied by a curated playlist. Tea, coffee, juice and yummy pastries will also be provided.
Find more information and purchase your tickets here.
LIVE MUSIC
PARALLEL LINES PRESENTS TONY NJOKU
ST MATTHIAS CHURCH
Dalston Kingsland I 20 November 19:30 – 23:00
Tony Njoku is a British-Nigerian electronic music producer and songwriter from London. Raised in between Lagos and London he has always been a frequent globetrotter with the breadth of his travels reflected in his music. His self-penned and produced songs have been described as "strikingly evocative soundscapes, managing to make even the shortest pop songs sound like epic adventures". Tony is promising "ethereal pressure" for his headline show in St Matthias Church, supported by feeo.
Buy your tickets here.
EXPERIMENTAL SOUND
CTM X ICA
ICA
Charing Cross I 22 to 23 November
Returning to ICA this November for the second year of collaboration, Berlin’s CTM Festival brings a range of styles and ideas—a journey of diverse practices and contrasts. Ahead of the 2025 edition of the festival, a two-day program will be presented at ICA with some of the curators' favourites. For 25 years, CTM has been highlighting new strains of club music and fringe sonic cultures that venture through the weird, the challenging, the cathartic, the esoteric, the contagious, and the ecstatic – simultaneously exploring sonic histories, contexts, and political and technological entanglements while remaining firmly rooted in the Berlin DIY culture it sprung from.
THEATRE
THE AIDS PLAYS PROJECT: CHRISTMAS ON MARS
RICH MIX
Shoreditch High Street I 1 December 15:00
The AIDS Plays Project is re-staging and re-publishing the theatrical works of writers whose lives were cut short by HIV/AIDS-related illnesses. Striving for cultural recovery and repair, they seek to mend the connection between these trailblazing playwrights and a younger generation of queer artists and audiences in the UK. For World AIDS Day 2024, The AIDS Plays Project is celebrating the life and work of the American playwright Harry Kondoleon, who passed away in 1994. Recently republished with Polari Press, Christmas on Mars is an overlooked classic of twentieth-century queer theatre that will be revived at Rich Mix in East London for a strictly limited, one-off rehearsed reading.
The performance takes place on 1 December, but will sell out quickly, so we've included it already in this week's Hot List to give you the chance to grab tickets here while they're still available!
