Nabihah Iqbal and Libby Heaney

Musician Nabihah Iqbal and visual artist and quantum physicist Libby Heaney bottle the sounds, sights and meaning of water in an audio-visual performance.

Through field recordings of the Thames, AI-generated sounds and visuals, as well as music and words, Iqbal and Heaney plunge you into an immersive world of real and artificial water-scapes.

In Cascade, the Thames serves as a focal point for the pair, pushing them to explore the materiality and symbolism attached to London’s river.

Bringing to light different stories and experiences of the Thames that have been submerged by mainstream narratives, Iqbal and Heaney attempt to recalibrate the history surrounding the river, using artificial intelligence to scatter and interfere with biased, colonial histories.

By blurring the boundaries which preserve the romance and grandeur of London’s great waterway, they rethink questions of identity, and what the Thames means in the context of contemporary Britain.

This performance follows on from their previous collaboration, The Whole Earth Chanting, which explored the transcendental nature of human and non-human voice through field recordings, AI-generated sound and meditative composition.

Orbit Friday 2022

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