HEARD, Rene Matić

Artist Rene Matić asks: ‘Can an image be heard?  How do the records we carry with us — songs, movements, basslines — define us?’

In this sculpture, Matić brings together photographs taken across east London, the wider city, Plymouth and Peterborough, evidencing how the love of friends and family is expressed through music and movement. Their photographs trace Black British music as a connective tissue through which communities across Britain gather, remember and move together. 

Matić assembled these images into the shape of a sound system, a Jamaican cultural legacy brought to the UK through the migration of the Windrush Generation. In this form, the photographs coalesce like sounds echoing from a sound system.

Commissioned with the support of The V&A Parasol Foundation Women in Photography Project