Performance: Come Beautify the Night with Otis Mensah

Enjoy a special evening of live music and poetry curated by Otis Mensah, featuring a screening of Otis Mensah and Jamal Sterrett’s film Come Beautify the Night and an exclusive in-person conversation with the artists. 

Created by interdisciplinary artist and musician Otis Mensah, Come Beautify the Night combines avant-garde musical-form with traditional elements of rap-flow and cadence, reflecting on the body as landscape across seven movements. The forthcoming album and the film – which is currently on display in the Graves Gallery – mark a seminal evolution as Otis’ compositional debut, with an abstractionist approach to sound and form that obscures the borders between self and place. Beginning in the North of England and drawing to a close in Berlin, the colliding dark / light textures and tonal shifts of Come Beautify the Night inhabit the nature of transition and the rewriting home – teetering between rurality to metropolarity. 

The “night” refers to that which is subdued and erased, while the act of “beautifying” exists as a ritual of resistance. The adornment of one’s self, the queering of gender, and the encryption of written and spoken language present themselves as oppositional modes of fierce defiance when one’s identity and sense of home are at stake. 

Otis Mensah 

Otis Mensah is a Sheffield-born, Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist whose work spans across fields of literature and sound, exploring the aesthetic fabric of language and cadence to evoke ethereal portraits of the body, family and race. Drawing from a rich lineage of Black musicality that informs their poetic-sonic practice, Otis derives multidimensional text from childhood, dreaming and nature. Following their tenure as the first Poet Laureate of Sheffield, Otis has published a debut poetry collection Safe Metamorphosis with Prototype London and performed live at Glastonbury Music Festival, We Out Here, XJAZZ Festival, and shared stages with the likes of Shabaka Hutchings, Moor Mother and Benjamin Zephaniah.  

Jamal Sterrett 
Jamal Sterrett is a self-taught performance artist exploring body, consciousness, and movement. Drawing from his autistic sensory experience, he treats each thought and bodily form as carrying its own consciousness, with improvisation as method and material. Stemming from Bruk Up, Mutation, and Ballet, his practice balances external and internal response, generating self-contained works or intuitive interactions with environments.  

seigfried komidashi 

seigfried komidashi has charted a palpably remarkable trajectory, from school practice-room experiments to avant-garde sound bricoleur to established voice within London's jazz ecosystem. His most recent artistic evolution reveals a deliberate shift from spontaneous improvisation toward calculated intentionality.  
 
Yumé NET 
Yumé NET crafts coruscating, otherworldly musical landscapes that explore what it means to be human in an increasingly online society, using experimental, electronic jazz as a framework. Tender but heavy, calculated but loving, her music invites the listener to explore what lies between and beyond the 0s and 1s.  

The suggested ticket price is £12, but we know that cost is a barrier for some. “Pay What You Can” tickets are also available so that those who need them can attend, paying whatever they can afford to give. Equally, if you are able, you may choose to pay above the standard ticket price to cover the cost of someone else’s ticket and support the event.