Ashley Holmes Live Audio Essay

For Gatherings, artist Ashley Holmes will present Dub Epistemology, an ongoing series of hybrid talks and live audio essays that treat sound as both archive and method. For this event, Holmes builds on his collaborative work with Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika, & Zoë Guthrie for aweys gaun, an upcoming exhibition part of Glasgow International 2026 - a project that honours the longstanding “hereness” of Black life in Scotland, calling and responding to, and swaying with, the Black Atlantic hum.

In this next chapter of his live audio essay series, Holmes explores the river as a recurring sonic and symbolic presence across Black musical traditions, tracing it as a site of memory, migration, spirituality, resistance, and return. Dub Epistemology proposes active, critical listening through personal collections of music, records, and Black Atlantic audio as a way of knowing.

Ashley Holmes

Ashley Holmes is an artist exploring collaborative and experimental approaches to performance, publishing and broadcasting. His work critically examines the ways music and sound function as sites of knowledge production, collective memory, and political possibility. Holmes’ recent research investigates how Western norms of ownership and property shape the circulation of music, access to land, and relationships to place – situating these questions within a wider discourse around identity, coloniality, and historical, cultural and social contexts.

He has recently exhibited work and performed at V&A Museum (2025), Arts Catalyst, No Bounds Festival, We Out Here Festival (2024), Horst Arts & Music Festival (2023), Turner Contemporary (2022), Frieze London (2021) and more. Ashley is a resident on NTS Radio, where he has hosted Tough Matter, a monthly show of experimental music and sound since 2017. He has been organising listening sessions and gatherings giving space to collectively listen and hold discussion around embodied knowledges and relationships to music, sound, memory and oral histories. In 2024 he was recipient of the Serpentine’s Support Structures for Support Structures fellowship award. Ashley teaches on the BA Fine Art programme at Liverpool John Moores University where he is also currently completing an MA in Fine Art.