Mahamed Abdullahi

Notes on Play

For ‘Notes on Play’, multi-disciplinary artist Shenece Oretha was commissioned to make a new work in response to the ‘Playtimes’ collection within the British Library’s Sound Archive – a rich variety of recordings documenting the imaginative, subversive and interpretative nature of play. The project is n partnership with the British Library’s ‘Unlocking Our Sound Heritage’ (UOSH) programme.

Using selected material from the sound archive as a starting point, ‘Notes on Play’ explores the politics of play, the creative capacities of active listening and the effects and meaning of the archival itself. The project offers an alternative means for a new or expanded audience to engage with the archive.

Through the act of listening to the collection our personal memories of childhood playtime can be conjured, which – beyond mere nostalgia – creates a sense of liveliness and palpability to our own, unique archive of imagination. Actively listening to the archive is also a means to critically re-examine it, to be attentive to who or what is missing. The lack of racial diversity in the digitised sound collection, despite existing in a national archive, reminds us of the urgency to address what archives do and who they are for. With this in mind, ‘Notes on Play’ aims to encourage listening – as a methodology and as an active practice – to be attentive not only towards what we can hear, but also towards what we cannot. Far from being static or passive, we understand the sound archive as a dynamic and active body that can be altered and reimagined, that can be a source for creativity – an artistic medium in itself that can be played with.

Curated by Mahamed Abdullahi, Maria Abramenko, Liza-Rose Burton, Rodrigo Chaveiro, Matilde Silva Fry, Kahyun Lee and Ruby Yang.

“Art is part of the struggle to reclaim a future that is not about the future at all but a present in which Indigenous territories, stories, bodies, and sensualities are unoccupied and uncivilized: I want to live there; that is where I live.” – Joanne Barker

Mahamed Abdullahi is an independent curator and writer, he is currently an assistant editor at Khidr Collective and was a founding member of sorryyoufeeluncomfortable (SYFU) collective. His practice is rooted in imagining otherwise, an elsewhere and an exit. He is interested in Black studies, the horizon of abolition, culture as creative refusal, aesthetics of care and the politics of food.

His research is primarily concerned with the possibility of art as a form of resistance. Specifically, art as a terrain of struggle and a site where we imagine and create the world(s) we desire. Through the formulation of the abolitionist curatorial, his dissertation addresses the role of art in establishing a world without harm, punishment and suffering. This critical posture allows us to think of art as operating on the register of a life and future making project.

His graduate project explores play in the most expansive sense of the word; as a method or tool of social justice, an experiment in living and a way of opening another world while we remain in this unliveable one. It is concerned with play as a form of social organisation that creates new subjectivities and entrenches existing ones. ‘Notes on Play’ asks how thinking playfully allows us to examine social mores and present counter-hegemonic futures.

Shenece Oretha, Possibilities, 2021 — This is a trailer of Shenece Oretha’s Possibilities which is a commissioned work for Notes on Play.

In Collaboration with:

Shenece Oretha

Shenece Oretha is a London-based multidisciplinary artist who explores the voice and sound’s mobilising potential. Through installation, performance, print, sculpture, sound, workshops and text she amplifies and celebrates listening and sound as an embodied and collective practice. Her work is attentive to not just the music, but the musicality of her experiences of Black oral traditions, ceremony, spiritual practice and literature, combined with the intimate emotional, physical, relational and communal resonance they generate.