Esi Eshun

Biography

I am a multidisciplinary artist and writer who works primarily with text, poetry, sound, voice, performance, archives, and still and moving images. My work is often participatory in nature, and frequently centres on the intersection between environmental disturbances and imperial histories, while exploring ways to repair emotional connections to land, place, and time by attempting to redress perceived differences between indigenous and Western knowledge systems.

I am currently a member of the research project, Concepts Have Teeth/Prisoners of Love, conducted in association with the University of Lethbridge, Canada, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and the University of Ghana among others which aims to look at material cultures, affective memory, and alternative futures, as part of the transnational AHRC funded project, Imagining Futures. I am also a participating artist on a 30 year Arts Council funded, environmental art project, When the Future Comes, exploring ways to create embodied interconnections between landscape, plant life, and diverse publics of Finsbury Park, by drawing on a range of mytho-cultural, botanical, historical, and climate based phenomena and practices.

My work is also grounded in notions of critical fabulation. Although based in rigorous research, it experiments with speculative narrative forms and performative approaches to documentary making in ways that seek to blur lines between fact and fiction, and which aim to interrogate the mechanisms of power incumbent within such notions. I also place an emphasis on voice, audio and poetic imaginaries in an attempt to destabilise inherited perceptions around time, space, identity and belonging.