Hannan Jones and Samir Kennedy – ‘Relay’

Saturday 13 September 2025
18:00 20:00

The Common Guild 5 Florence Street Glasgow, G5 0YX (map)

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‘Relay’ is the first iteration of a new live performance by Hannan Jones and Samir Kennedy using movement, sound and improvisation. Developed during a recent residency at Triangle, Marseille, ‘Relay’ explores edges and absence, and continuation and exhaustion through sonic looping, sound collage and combinations of improvised and choreographed gesture.

The performance meditates on the artists’ shared Algerian-British identities, testing ways in which to articulate and embody multiplicity and intersecting psychological states. Through movement and sound, Jones and Kennedy map temporal, sonic and geographical space, connecting points between Marseille and Glasgow (twinned cities), and shared histories that extend beyond the present.

Working with analogue equipment - specifically elongated reel-to-reel tape loops that are stretched through the space - Jones builds a multilayered soundscape that rhythmically returns, drops out and repeats on itself. Using contact microphones, Kennedy samples sounds made by the body in motion. In recurrent movements, and choreographic abstraction, Kennedy builds bodily narratives and an emotional progression that eventually reaches exhaustion. Together, the pair develop a cyclical exchange between sound and choreography, relaying back and forth within sonic space.

‘Relay’ articulates a sense of a constantly searching present: infinitely shifting, endlessly adrift and always propelling forwards. The performance tests the ways in which liveness can reveal thresholds of both vulnerability and resistance.

About the artists /

Hannan Jones is an artist of Algerian and Welsh origin raised on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja, Western Australia, now based in Glasgow. Research-led and process driven, she practices at the intersections of moving-image, installation and sound.

Jones deep-dives into concepts of hybridity, language, and rhythms that are associated with cultural and social migration, and psychogeography. Sonically, Jones’ approach is rooted in improvisation, electronics, music concrète, and analogue recordings. Using samples and layering of audio material to create alternate possibilities, reclaim parallel histories, and reimagine connections between them. She is a graduate of the Sculpture and Environmental Art department at The Glasgow School of Art, and from 2020-2021 she was an Associate Artist of Open School East.

Previous presentations include Triangle, Marseille; Artes Mundi and the National Roman Legion Museum, Caerleon; CCA Annex; Cafe Oto, London; Edinburgh Art Festival; New Radicalisms, Rotterdam; Tate Lates, Tate Modern, London and REWIRE, The Hague and La Chunky, Glasgow. Hannan is a 2023 Oram Award winner and at present she is resident at Wysing Arts Centre.

Samir Kennedy is a queer British/Algerian artist based in Marseille working at the intersections of choreography, performance, sound and video. He discovered performance through a choir concert at primary school, when a voice came out of his mouth that seemingly wasn’t his own. He quickly moved on to musical theatre, finding contemporary dance where he finished his studies at Laban, UK in 2013, eventually graduating from the MA EXERCE programme at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier in 2023.

Since then Kennedy has established a diverse, interdisciplinary practice, working internationally across a range of contexts and roles: as performer, choreographer, director, sound designer and dramaturg working in established theatre venues, underground, experimental spaces, clubs and galleries.

His work engages critically with themes of class, race, otherness, queerness, and abjection, centring the body as a site from which to explore and subvert the deployment of archetypal figures—such as the devil, the zombie, and the clown. He interrogates collective consciousness and cultural symbolism, using these figures as frameworks to examine intersectional identities. His approach blends aestheticised sociological markers with speculative narratives, destabilising conventional representations and proposing alternative realities in which queer existentialism and liminal identities can be explored and reimagined. His formal interests are diverse and reflect the needs of each project but can be always understood as choreographic in their treatment of aural, visual and temporal fields.