Presented with support from the Audain Foundation.
Night follows night, and the two and three-stringed instruments talk to each other is a two-day, multi-modal, multi-sensory assembly that moves across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Taking inspiration from polyphonic collectives and embodied ritual practices, it brings together resonant works by internationally recognized artists working across disciplines. Drawing its title from a Persian poem penned by Hafez Shirazi, Night follows night shifts attention away from representational discourse towards practices of embodiment, to accommodate emergent aesthetic forms in which song is lament, food is evidence, poetry is history and objects speak.
Day 2 of the Night follows Night will include a new video work by New York-based artist Constantina Zavitsanos, a lecture-performance by London-based artist Jasleen Kaur and a screening by Christian Nyampeta & Kivu Ruhorahoza. The day closes with a performance by Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa (BFA ’05).
Registration coming soon.
Jasleen Kaur is an artist based in London, who explores cultural memory and political belonging. Kaur makes with the slurry of life, interested in the social histories contained within the material things that surround us. In her practice, mass-produced, everyday objects are coded with symbols and images, questioning how the narratives we inherit circulate in discreet ways and, in turn, shape us. Solo exhibitions and commissions include Superstructure, Glasgow 2026 Festival (2026); Boomerang, Hollybush Gardens, London; Was. Is. Will be., a permanent artwork for Thamesmead, London (2025); Alter Altar, Tramway, Glasgow (2023); Flesh ‘n’ Blood, Humber Street Gallery, Hull; Gut Feelings Meri Jaan, Touchstones Rochdale (2021); and Be Like Teflon, Glasgow Women’s Library (2019). In 2019, her book Be Like Teflon was co-published by Glasgow Women’s Library and Dent-De-Leone. Kaur is the winner of the 2024 Turner Prize, and she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Glasgow School of Art in 2025.
Christian Nyampeta is an artist living in New York from where he organizes programs, exhibitions, screenings, performances, and publications, which are conceived as hosting structures for collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action. Nyampeta is the convener of Boda Boda Lounge 2022-2024, a trans-African film and video art festival. In New York, Nyampeta convenes the African Film Institute at e-flux in Brooklyn.
Kivu Ruhorahoza is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist based in Kigali. Kivu’s work has been showcased at A-List festivals including Sundance, Berlinale, TriBeCa, IDFA, Melbourne, Venice and renowned museums including the MoMA in New York. Kivu was the 2022–2023 Stewart McMillan Fellow in distinguished filmmaking and an affiliate of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa is an artist based in Guatemala City, whose practice spans performance, video, printmaking, sculpture, and installation, reflecting on collective memory, displacement, state violence, and colonial legacies in Latin America. His work incorporates personal, dreamlike, and bodily narratives. He has held solo exhibitions at MoMA, New York; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; MAMM, Medellín; Museum M, Leuven; The Power Plant, Toronto; New Museum, New York; Kunsthalle Lissabon; CAPC, Bordeaux; and Gasworks, London. He participated in the 57th Venice Biennale and the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo. His work is held in collections including Tate, Guggenheim, and MoMA.
Constantina Zavitsanos is a New York based artist who works in sculpture, performance, text, and sound to elaborate what’s invaluable in the re/production of debt, dependency, and means beyond measure. Zavitsanos has exhibited at the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Artists Space, PSNY, The Kitchen, and Participant Inc in New York; at MMK, Frankfurt, HKW, Berlin, Galerie Max Mayer, Berlin, Arika UK, Glasgow, and If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam. With Park McArthur, they wrote “Other Forms of Conviviality” in the journal Women and Performance, and “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Zavitsanos has received a Roy Lichtenstein Award in Visual Arts from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, a Keith Haring Fellowship in Art & Activism from Bard College/CCS, A Wynn Newhouse Foundation Award, and an Anonymous Was A Woman award.
100 Years in the Making | This event is organized in support of ECU 100, Emily Carr University of Art + Design’s centennial anniversary.
Organized by Libby Leshgold Gallery, Western Front, and the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, with additional support from the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery; The Indigenous Initiatives Fund; Critical Image Forum; and the Curatorial Research Cluster at the University of British Columbia.