Shenece Oretha (also known as ORETHA) was born in Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory in the Carirbbean (her year of birth is currently unconfirmed) and in 2018 she graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Converging multichannel sound installations, performance, text, print, and sculpture, Oretha’s focus is on polyvocality and listening as an embodied practice; her works choreograph layers of music, voice, recordings and noise to shape moments of communion and ceremony, interrogating the emotional, physical and relational sonic material of Blackness. Oretha was nominated for the 2021 Turner Prize as part of the Black Obsidian Sound System Collective.
Multidisciplinary artist and DJ, Shenece Oretha (also known as ORETHA) was born in Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory in the Carribean (her year of birth is currently unconfirmed) In 2018 she graduated with BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Converging multichannel sound installations, performance, text, print, and sculpture, Oretha’s focus is on polyvocality and listening as an embodied practice. She choreographs layers of music, voice, recordings and noise to shape moments of communion and ceremony. Her practice interrogates the emotional, physical and relational sonic material of Blackness. In sharp contrast to the stark technological hardware often present in her installations, her work builds on the mobilising effects of Black oral traditions, celebrating the exchange and participation of intimate action, testimonials and emotional responses to generate expressions of collective imagination. Oretha reflects that, ‘One of the things I’m trying to convey to the world right now is the importance of listening. That listening is something that we not only do with our ears but with our whole body. How do we listen to multiple voices? How do we hear, how do we feel more than one person at once? How do we take on the feelings, the thoughts and the words of others and doing that through creating polyvocal installations where people are talking about how they inhabit the world. The fact then that we can try and take on these people’s views of the world and maybe also how they envisage the world to be, how they want to recreate the world that we inhabit now’ (Shenece Oretha, BBZBLKBK).
Oretha has exhibited her work in group exhibitions including Congregation and Non-Exchange: General Assembly at the ICA, London (2017), as part of the Wysing Polyphonic Festival at the Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge (2018), at PRAISE N PAY IT/ PULL UP, COME INTO THE RISE at the South London Gallery (2018) and at BBZBLKBK: Alternative Graduate Show, at the Copeland Gallery in Peckham (2018). Solo exhibitions of her work include TESTING GROUNDS at Cafe OTO Project Space, E8 (2019) and Called to Respond at Cell Project Space, E2 (2020) which featured a multi-channel work built on Black oral traditions through written and performed poetry. Comprised of two active speakers transformed into percussive instruments, the work functioned as an automated tambourine, with three rows of cymbals suspended on wire and affixed to an exposed subwoofer.
In 2021 Oretha was commissioned to make a new work in response to the ‘Playtimes’ collection within the British Library’s Sound Archive as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2021, under the auspices of the Royal College of Art (RCA), London in partnership with British Library’s ‘Unlocking Our Sound Heritage’ (UOSH) programme. Using selected material from the sound archive as a starting point, Possibilities, presented as part of the resulting exhibition, Notes on Play, explored the politics of play, the effects and meaning of the archive itself and the creative capacities of active listening. Possibilities was launched online on 8 May 2021. Identifying the underrepresented voices in the digitised collection and a lack of cultural diversity, the project asks ‘Can we turn our attention not only towards what we can hear, but also towards what we cannot?’ (CCA Show 2021- Notes on Play, Royal College of Art website). Oretha’s work ‘allows listeners to participate in this re-examination, by placing the relationship between play, improvisation and possibility at the forefront’ (CCA Show 2021- Notes on Play, Royal College of Art website). Similar to the collective act of playing, Oretha’s work celebrates the possibility of community and collaboration that active listening can initiate. It sets the conditions for the archived sounds of play to be ‘opened back up to possibilities; different outcomes, directions, gestures, routes for those who encounter the work’ (Shenece Oretha, CCA Show 2021- Notes on Play, Royal College of Art website).
Oretha was nominated for the 2021 Turner Prize as a member of the Black Obsidian Sound System Collective, established in the summer of 2018 with the intention of bringing together a community of queer, trans and non-binary black and people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism. The Turner Prize 2021 shortlist comprised five Collectives; an exhibition of the work of the Collectives will take place at Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry during 2021-2022. Shenece Oretha lives and works in London. Her work is in the collection of the British Library.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Shenece Oretha]
Publications related to [Shenece Oretha] in the Ben Uri Library