Music and song at heart of new Fact exhibition

A new immersive exhibition at FACT explores how music and song underpin both our family and collective histories.

Let the Song Hold Us, which has opened at the Wood Street gallery, is part of its Radical Ancestry season which looks at how our sense of belonging is shaped by the histories, geographies, biology and culture we inherit.

Eight artists are showing work in the venue’s two gallery spaces and in a new installation – artist and dancer Zinzi Minott’s Fi Dem V – A Redemptive Song – in the entrance atrium.

Focussing on Liverpool’s Caribbean community, Minott explores the city’s history as a port and its part in the Transatlantic slave trade as well as amplifying the current struggles of Merseyside’s Windrush community.

Centred around song and music as a way to communicate ideas of family, hope, and belonging, the works in the exhibition reimagine the ways we create and share; what we inherit, and what we pass on.

Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind present a new triptych video installation of an Arabic-language opera that brings together Palestinian and European classical music traditions. Commissioned by FACT, As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night considers the genetic inheritance of political trauma through multiple generations of families.

Above: Ebun Sodipo’s Following the Gourd. Top: Rae-Yen Song’s ==aaaaaahmaaaaaa==. Photos by Rob Battersby.

It is being presented in gallery 1, as is Songs for living by Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic, a new large-scale cinematic collage of visual languages and musical styles weaving together stories of grief, transformation and spiritual power.

Upstairs in gallery 2, visitors can see a trio of works – Rae-Yen Song’s ==aaaaaahmaaaaaa==, a new installation of objects and drawings, animated using sound and augmented reality; Dark Circles by Tessa Norton, and Ebun Sodipo’s Following the Gourd, a new interactive artwork taking the form of a series of constellations and created in collaboration with young LGBTQ+ people from Liverpool and across the UK.

Let the Song Hold Us is at FACT until June 19.