Ritornellos is a group exhibition with Kevin Beasley, Mohamed Bourouissa, Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom and Devin B. Johnson, presented within an exhibition design by Studio Tre.

Ritornellos takes the concept of the musical refrain as a point of departure to explore contemporary manifestations of assemblage in painting, sculpture and sound, presenting artworks that combine not only a diversity of materials but also a multiplicity of narratives, cultures and histories.

The idea of using a musical term to reflect upon the notion of assemblage is inspired by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari’s chapter on the ‘Ritournelle’ in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Designating a recurrent instrumental section interspersed with rhythmical variations and contrasting episodes, the ritornello – ‘little return’ in Italian, commonly called ‘refrain’ in English – became a term employed by Deleuze & Guattari to describe the ‘logic of multiplicities’ underlying any formation of an assemblage. Such assemblages can be individual (the atoms and organs composing a body, as well as the diverse characteristics forming an identity), collective (the formation of cities, communities and territories), or artistic (e.g. a painting made with an array of lines, textures and colours; a sculptural composition made of multiple materials and fragments; or a melody in which converge a diversity of sounds, movements and counterpoints).

Challenging notions of unity and linearity, the artists in Ritornellos consider the multitude of rhythms – periodic, circadian, liturgical – that define territories and the relations between the beings living in them. This process is similarly identified by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), wherein she reads the environment as a series of polyphonic assemblages in which ‘autonomous melodies intertwine’.

The artists included in Ritornellos have been selected for their unique approaches, which each highlight a different means of stretching the practice of assemblage beyond its art historical definition as a three-dimensional technique, using it as a way to think about identity formation, both individual and collective, as an interlocking montage of disparate parts, constantly modified by elements coming from the outside.

Appau Jnr Boakye Yiadom’s During: Many Different Exchanges, 2023, a musical composition that explores ideas of polyphony and assemblage by interweaving two sets of musical improvisations performed by two pianists in London, Bruno Heinen and Kerry Yong. Based on sequences of films in which characters are offering flowers – from Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) to Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989) – Boakye-Yiadom’s soundtrack intermingles disparate spaces and times, opening up a space of exchange between two differing interpretations of a similar scene.

Boakye-Yiadom’s soundtrack is accompanied by two double-sided photographs of pianos taken during the recording sessions. Featuring angular, semi-abstracted perspectives of the piano on which the composition was played on one side, and details of the playlist on the reverse, Boakye-Yiadom’s photographs parallel the fractured dimension of the sound piece, highlighting the fragmentary nature of the collective spaces we inhabit.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38483