GAIKA
Gaika Tavares, better known as GAIKA, is an artist and writer who describes his work as ‘building worlds from the memories we have lost’.
Hailing from South London, GAIKA is influenced by creatives from across the artistic spectrum, including Arakakwa and Gins, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Torkwase Dyson, Issac Julien, Prince, Lee Scratch Perry, Wu-Tang Clan, Goldie, Genioh Yamashirogumi and Steve McQueen.
GAIKA has released a number of EPs, singles and mixtapes, as well as two studio albums, the critically-acclaimed Basic Volume (2018), and last year’s War Island Ost. In 2018 he exhibited System, a sculpture in collaboration with Boiler Room and Somerset House Studios which filled the middle portion of Somerset House’s Lancaster Room. He is most proud of his interactive audiovisual sculpture Zemel (2022), which featured in British Art Show 9.
‘I grew up in South London so the Southbank Centre has had an enduring effect on me, in that I’ve always seen culture as something to be created and preserved in physical spaces.’
Gaika will be using the Southbank Centre Studio to develop a new multimedia performance piece entitled Turbulence at Black Bay Grenada. In collaboration with Kidä (music), Dr Hannah Elsisi (curation and archival), and eina idea (design), Turbulence at Black Bay is an intense and epic exploration of rebellion, chaos and collective reckoning.
It moves socially and visually through rituals of social revolt and tectonic rupture across Grenada, Egypt and the African diaspora, and the layered histories of sonic rites that incite to turbulence: from dancehall, trip-hop and noise to grime, Arab maqam and Saharan blues. The show's first iteration will be developed for the Hayward Gallery in late May 2023.
Explaining what the Southbank Centre Studio opportunity enables him to do he said, ‘It’s good to have the space to explore experimental works at the scale I can imagine… it’s really rare to get the chance to complete a work of that size and hybrid nature before deploying it to the general public. I hope to be able to perfect [the work] to close down the gap between imagination and realisation’.
As GAIKA explains, his Southbank Centre Studio is the latest chapter in a relationship between the artist and our venues that extends back to his childhood. ‘My mum always took us [to the Southbank Centre] when we were young. I guess it's had an enduring effect in that I have always seen culture as something to be created and preserved in physical spaces. Cultural centres are important for the soul of a city and of a nation’.