Music, video and conversation with Edward George, Ash Sharma, Paul Rekret and Louis Moreno.

In 1993 Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs founds the Bad Boy Entertainment label as an imprint of Sony Music and, in the years that follow, leads the mainstreaming of New York hip-hop and RnB in global popular culture. This moment marks changing coordinates of an aesthetics of light and a politics of economic monopoly. This discussion, drawing from the forthcoming book Monopolated Light and Power (87 Press), takes Bad Boy Entertainment as the starting point for a reflection that intersects financial capitalism and gentrification, the physics of light and the metaphysics of value, death and mourning, and millennial music and video aesthetics.

This event has been organised in conjunction with Anneke Kampman’s exhibition An Endless Archive, on view at San Mei Gallery between 28 April – 10 June 2023.

Biographies

Edward George is a writer and broadcaster. Founder of Black Audio Film Collective, George wrote and presented the ground-breaking science fiction documentary Last Angel of History (1996). He hosts Sound of Music (Threads Radio) and Kuduro – Electronic Music of Angola (Counterflows). George’s series The Strangeness of Dub (Morley Radio) dives into reggae, dub, versions and versioning, drawing on critical theory, social history, and a deep and a wide cross-genre musical selection.

Louis Moreno’s research explores the spatial, historical and cultural modes of financial capitalism with a particular focus on architecture, urbanism and music. Louis is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures and the Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London, London. Louis is a member of the collectives freethought, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective and Unspecified Enemies.

Paul Rekret is the author of Down With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence, Derrida and Foucault: Philosophy, Politics and Poetics, and editor of George Caffentzis’s Clipped Coins. His next book is on contemporary songs about work titled Take This Hammer: Work, Song, and Crisis and he has published widely on contemporary cultural and political theory. He is a member of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective and teaches political theory at Richmond American International University.

Ashwani Sharma teaches and writes in the areas of film and contemporary art, poetics, race, diasporic culture, postcolonial, media and cultural studies. They are the founding co-editor of darkmatter journal (https://darkmatter-hub.pubpub.org/). They are a senior lecturer at the London College of Communication (UAL). They are working on a monograph on race and audiovisual culture (Bloomsbury Academic), and their first collection of poetry/experimental writing. They co-wrote with Azad Ashim Sharma and Kashif Sharma-Patel Suburban Finesse (Sad Press). They have also published poetry with Mote, The Hythe, and 87 Press. Ashwani is the co-editor of Disorienting Rhythms: The Politics of Asian Dance Music (Zed Press).