Hannah Catherine Jones
Owed to Humana
 
ONLINE COMMISSION
 
16 Oct 2020
 
ONLINE COMMISSION
16 Oct 2020
Hannah Catherine Jones, Owed to Humana, video still, 2020. Courtesy the artist.
Obsidian Coast is excited to present Owed to Humana, an online commission by Hannah Catherine Jones, as the final tide of (Extra)Terrestrial Currents. Owed to Humana is a composition of sound, text and moving image transmitting queer diasporic experience in search of Black liberation.


Departing from a sphere of Black joy and solidarity on the Earth’s surface, Owed to Humana traverses the atmosphere and drifts through our solar system towards Pluto and the Andromeda Galaxy, the neighbour of Milky Way named after an Ethiopean princess in Greek mythology. On this voyage, Jones’ layered mediation traces the tentacular and ubiquitous reach of whitesupremacist, patriarchal colonialism, always at work to confine the entire realm of existence, from earthly to extraterrestrial to metaphysical, into its own insular logic. Though entirely arbitrary, the culture of whiteness is a forceful edifice that seeks to engulf everything in order to control all time, thought and matter. Turning to celestial bodies that subvert this colonial rule, Owed to Humana is mapping an escape from the all-consuming event horizon of whiteness to imagine an otherwise – an otherwise where there are new myths for the cosmos, new ways of relating with the world, and new paths to liberation.

Owed to Humana is the latest iteration in Jones’ ongoing body of work, The Oweds, made specifically for online presentation with a hyperlinked transcript that opens up an infinite web of notions, salutations, histories and divinations. The Oweds are a temporal form of (self-)reparation, a method of connection with ancestry through sonic ritual, using combinations of voice, theremin, stringed instruments and visuals which are sometimes orchestrated though predominantly improvised.
HANNAH CATHERINE JONES
Hannah Catherine Jones (aka Foxy Moron) is a London-based artist, musician, multi-instrumentalist, researcher, radio presenter, composer, conductor and founder of Peckham Chamber Orchestra – a community project established in 2013.

Jones is currently an AHRC DPhil scholar at Oxford University (Christ Church) for which The Oweds will be presented as a series of live and recorded audio-visual episode-compositions using disruptive sound to disintegrate the boundary between theory and practice, and as a methodology of institutional decolonisation.

Jones’ other and previous research interests include exploring the relationship between Afrofuturism and Gesamtkunstwerk through the art-music of Sun Ra and Wagner, amplifying Black Orpheus, and re-queering the Ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Jones has lectured internationally, including at Oxford University, Trinity LABAN, Royal College of Art, Kingston, Sussex, Teesside, LCC, ECA, Liverpool Biennial (UK), NYU, Harvard (US), Umuzi (SA), Liquid Architecture (AUS), and has performed widely including at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto), Wagner Museum (Bayreuth), Beirut Arts Centre, Modern Art Oxford, Tate Modern, Serpentine, Gasworks, Guest Projects, Vitrine, IMT, Almanac and Whitechapel galleries (London).

www.foxymoron.co.uk
(EXTRA)TERRESTRIAL CURRENTS
(Extra)Terrestrial Currents is an online programme of artist moving image, sound and text, presenting a screening programme with artists Thirza Cuthand, Ayesha Hameed, Evan Ifekoya and Himali Singh Soin, a commission by artist and composer Hannah Catherine Jones and a reading list by scholar Kathryn Yusoff.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Owed to Humana was commissioned by Obsidian Coast as part of (Extra)Terrestrial Currents

This project is generously supported by Arts Council England.