Jess Heritage, slow fall, 2025.
£10/£5 members & concessions
The Conch is an event where artists share new work that is still in development. After each presentation, the audience is invited to respond by sharing their thoughts, questions and reflections.
This edition of The Conch brings together artists exploring what happens when language, images and technology begin to break down, repeat or behave in unexpected ways.
Jess Heritage
So, just before this begins is a live performance that combines spoken narration with a projected moving image. The artist pauses, repeats and returns to different moments throughout the performance, so that the relationship between the voice and the images is constantly shifting. The work keeps changing and never fully settles into one version.
Harmeet Rahal
Afterprayers is a live sound performance that explores moments of uncertainty, anticipation and confusion. Using an Android phone, an electric guitar and everyday objects, the artist creates a soundtrack that follows unexpected connections and shifting patterns.
Eleanor Arnold
In A Town Can Always Handle Another Good Optometrist, the artist reverses the roles of viewer and viewed by carrying out an eye test on a security camera. Through this performance, the work asks how ways of seeing are shaped by fixed viewpoints, systems of measurement and ideas of progress.
Please note: The event will begin promptly at 7pm.
This event includes flashing and strobing lights, projected moving images and loud sound.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jess Heritage works mainly with speech and performance. Her work often begins in the middle of something: a conversation already underway, or one that is just out of earshot. Her performances explore uncertainty and ambiguity through forms of speech that pause, hesitate, repeat or never quite arrive. By drawing attention to interruptions and gaps in communication, she reveals the often unnoticed structures that shape language.
Her performances often take the form of scripted dialogues that drift and are interrupted, unfolding between performers or within audio-visual installations. Using live voice-over, audio description and pre-recorded moving images, she creates shifting relationships between speech and image. She also works with simple, provisional architectural structures that, like the language in her performances, remain open, understated and unresolved.
Harmeet Rahal (b. 1996, Mumbai) is an artist and filmmaker based in South-East London. Working across moving image, sound, drawing, print and installation, his research-led practice explores unofficial histories, acts of rebellion and the ways language and fiction can reshape stories that have been left out of official records.
His recent work has focused on borders, movement and systems of control. Through film, performance and installation, he examines themes including smuggling, migration and waiting, drawing attention to how power is exercised through administrative systems and national borders. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Flatland Projects, Cafe OTO and CIRCA Prize screenings.
Eleanor Arnold works across sculpture and performance. Her work explores what happens when systems begin to break down, using movement, light, sound and rhythm to push familiar structures beyond the point where they work as expected. Although these systems often appear technological, they are closely connected to the body and everyday human experience.
Through sculpture, performance and installation, Arnold explores themes of control, perception and the effort involved in appearing to function smoothly. By embracing disruption, excess and instability, her work reveals the fragility and complexity that can lie beneath seemingly ordered systems.
ACCESS
- Event is seated.
- This event will be live-captioned.
- There is no break out space but participants are welcome to take breaks before and after presentations
- Room may be dark at times.
- Wheelchair access and accessible toilets are available at this site.
- Please contact foh@southlondongallery.org with access requirements.
TICKET INFORMATION
- Tickets are limited and sold online through Eventbrite.
- If an event is sold out, there may still be tickets on the door. These will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis and are not guaranteed.
- Please note the South London Gallery’s terms and conditions.
- All tickets purchased through the South London Gallery’s website and/or the South London Gallery’s Eventbrite account are non-refundable.