Library Transmission with The Otolith Collective at Ibraaz
Listening to musicians, composers and producers as they talk about the music that informed their thinking in the past and the present, you begin to hear a series of insights, allusions and intimations into their sonic ways of knowing the world. Those intimations, allusions and insights are what inform the structure and the format of Contemplative Dialogues.
Contemplative Dialogue 2 explores performer and composer Elaine Mitchener’s reimagination of the works of the African-American vocalist, sound poet, composer and educator Jeanne Lee under the name of The Jeanne Lee Project.
Mitchener’s intertemporal dialogues with the music of Jeanne Lee continues her ongoing ambition to build a living bridge upon which the vocal classics of the Black avant-garde cross time to enter and reorganise the consciousness of twenty first century listeners.
Join us as we listen to the voice environments of Jeanne Lee that have helped shape the musical expansiveness, the poetic alienation and the political fearlessness of the sonic black womanhood of Elaine Mitchener.
Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and finishes at 8pm.
Wednesday 25 February 2026, 6pm
Ibraaz
www.ibraaz.org
Elaine Mitchener is a British Afro-Caribbean vocalist, movement artist and composer working between contemporary/experimental new music, free improvisation and visual art. She is currently a Wigmore Hall Associate Artist, also an Artist Associate with ENSEMBLE KLANG and a NEEDCompany Fellow. Elaine was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow (2022), an exhibiting artist in the British Art Show 9 (2021-22) and in 2020 a selected artist for the Rauschenberg Residency.
In February 2022 Mitchener was awarded an MBE for Services to Music. Her debut album SOLO THROAT was released in May 2024 under Café Oto’s OTORUKO label. As a guest curator Elaine developed and presented Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery’s Deep Time Festival (Basquiat&Cage 8424) and Politics of the Voice for Courtisane Festival (Ghent, Belgium).
The Otolith Collective is a long-standing artist led organisation supporting intergenerational and intragenerational art practices, research-led projects, writing and process-based forms of development. They create environments that nourish discourse and discussion, co-commission artists, and curate exhibitions and programmes with a wide range of collaborators, organisations and institutions here and elsewhere. Theirs is an international project based on transnational and translocal vision who are committed to maintaining and animating an experimental and worldmaking approach. Performing across disciplines such as visual art, performance, new music, film and video, new technology and critical writing, we draw a diverse range of audiences. The OC has curated seminal exhibitions and platforms on the work of figures such as Black Audio Film Collective, Mark Fisher, Harun Farocki, Bahar Noorizadeh, The Chimurenga Library, Chris Marker, to name but a few. www.otolithgroup.org
Image credit: Elaine Mitchener, guided hand | series 4 -13. Courtesy of the artist
