Alanna Baxter, Lara Oluklu and Naimo Omar

2 - 24 April 2026
Opening celebration: Thursday 2 April, 5-7pm

I had believed in the logic of popular songs.¹

As Long As You Love Me attempts to showcase variational reading(s) of [insert whatever media types] through illegible modes of translation.

The show is structured around one mimetic act, a sequence of (re)iteration. Image, feeling, sound, self, audience and lamentation represent where public and private transform (perhaps dissolve) the personal and impersonal. Fred Moten describes voice as a “kind of genuine, authentic, absolute individuation, which struck as (a) undesirable and (b) impossible, whereas a 'sound' was really within the midst of this intense engagement with everything.”²
Through the negation of voice, poem becomes script. We yield access to an immeasurable cultural bank of reference that stares straight back, woundering.³

¹ Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.
² David S. Wallace, Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present.
³ Cecilia Vicuña, Language is Migrant.

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Alanna Baxter: Alanna Baxter is interested in repetition, iteration and spectatorship, with particular attention to how agency and modes of viewing are produced and reproduced. Working across sculpture, performance and video, their work examines authenticity, the tension between a crowd and an audience, and how sincerity fractures through reference. They deny the clean homogenising satisfaction of a point and instead gesture toward an open-ended rhythm. 

Lara Oluklu: My painting practice is sometimes fixed on looking, and looking again differently: an ongoing whirrrrrr. The relation(s) between literature and poetry, music and ritual, are a point of rapid departure that guide my work. Fragmented connections collide in textured touch. In search of historical pathways, I study and examine their common and/or outlying threads together. I am looking for other possibilities—not reduction—toward something else, another way. 

Naimo Omar: I remake, make, compose and recompose sound, video, print, text and sculpture, in reference to transnational conceptions of Somaalinimo/Somali-ness. The silence of Black life in the archives, and the enmeshment of coloniality in these silences, is resounding. I track a pattern of obsolescence and inertia in its lexis using tools developed within Black Feminist and Deconstructionist discourse. Ultimately, it is a hollowing act of my enfleshed diasporic subjectivity, this practice, a sifting and sifting of form.