Spike Island presents Feedback (31 January – 3 May 2026), the largest solo exhibition by Nigerian-British artist, filmmaker and DJ Olukemi Lijadu. Developed through extensive research in Chicago, Lagos, and Bristol, Feedback centres around a major film commission and marks a landmark in the artist’s moving image practice. 

The film draws on the concept of audio feedback as a metaphor for the circulation of rhythm, memory, and cultural codes within the African diaspora. Audio feedback – the loop where sound cycles between output and input, amplifying itself—becomes a way to understand how cultures, stories, and histories reverberate across continents and generations. The drum, both as a physical instrument and as a symbol of rhythmic connection, beats the film’s time. Tracing its evolution from traditional West African drumming traditions to electronic drum machines, Feedback highlights how the drum functions as a structural and spiritual backbone of communal gathering.    

Lijadu traces the legacy of West African music on electronic music, investigating how the process of looping underpins not only music but also collective memory and (dis)connection. Her research spans sites crucial to Black culture: from Chicago music festivals to the beaches of Lagos, with nods to Bristol’s African-Caribbean heritage. A sound system completes the film installation. The sound system functions both as a mode of display and as a physical metaphor for the amplification of histories, voices, and vibrations. Drawing from Bristol’s famous sound system culture, this sculptural element emphasises the connections forged by the artist during her research residencies in the city. 

Inspired by early abstract cinema, Feedback embraces repetition, tempo, and visual rhythm as cinematic devices. It also complicates and subverts this vocabulary, allowing the artist to appropriate the legacy of a Western-centric art history.  

Olukemi Lijadu

Olukemi Lijadu is a multi-disciplinary artist and DJ, with a focus on moving image and sound. She recently was a recipient of London’s ICA Image Behaviour grant where she was commissioned to create and debut her most recent film-performance Guardian Angel. 

In 2018, she graduated from Stanford as a masters student in Philosophy where she focused on African philosophical systems. Her academic background grounds her research-based approach to her artistic practice. Her work explores questions around music of the diaspora, heritage and the complexity of feeling.