Samples and Extended Plays: Recomposing the Archive
Archives are not neutral – they are contested sites of memory. Here at 125 Shaftesbury Avenue artists dismantle, reassemble, and amplify fragments of personal, cultural, and institutional records, expose omissions and distortions buried in the official gaze, and reveal dimensions of the seen and unseen, tangible and ephemeral, and sensory and not strictly sensory processes we use to remember. Memories are in motion – they stretch, slide, evaporate and condense, perhaps rattling into something new?
I. Nakhla interweaves field recordings from women’s football culture with experimental composition, crafting sonic counter-narratives. Ting Huang examines ideological mimicry and cultural tension through reimagined propaganda aesthetics, navigating shifting identities and imposed narratives. Adam Moore’s choreographic promenade collides with fragments and impressions of home, mapping displacement through embodied remembrance. Peyvand Sadeghian and Matthew Robison subvert NASA’s audio-visual archives through fractured film and speculative critique, exhuming the human traces within bureaucratic systems. Inspired by Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Joao Ibraime Atumane de Carvalho, Cartier and Dom Parry Merrell (Black Wall Collective) rebirth Greek ancestry tragedies for contemporary life. Curated by Adam Moore in close collaboration with residency artists, these works punctuate the dormant spaces at 125 Shaftesbury Avenue’s offices with ephemeral, irreplicable, radically reimagined and remastered visions of past, present, and future.
Adam Moore, Farther. Like a dream unfinished into ever (2023) performed at Samples and Extended Plays curated by Adam Moore (2025), Bow Arts 125 Shaftesbury Avenue Takeover. Photo Alberto Romano.
Adam Moore, Farther. Like a dream unfinished into ever (2023) performed at Samples and Extended Plays curated by Adam Moore (2025), Bow Arts 125 Shaftesbury Avenue Takeover. Photo Alberto Romano.
Adam Moore, Farther. Like a dream unfinished into ever (2023) performed at Samples and Extended Plays curated by Adam Moore (2025), Bow Arts 125 Shaftesbury Avenue Takeover. Photo Alberto Romano.
Adam Moore, Farther. Like a dream unfinished into ever (2023) performed at Samples and Extended Plays curated by Adam Moore (2025), Bow Arts 125 Shaftesbury Avenue Takeover. Photo Alberto Romano.
Adam Moore, Farther. Like a dream unfinished into ever (2023) performed at Samples and Extended Plays curated by Adam Moore (2025), Bow Arts 125 Shaftesbury Avenue Takeover. Photo Alberto Romano.
Adam Moore, Farther. Like a dream unfinished into ever (2023) performed at Samples and Extended Plays curated by Adam Moore (2025), Bow Arts 125 Shaftesbury Avenue Takeover. Photo Alberto Romano.
Adam Moore, Farther. Like a dream unfinished into ever (2023) performed at Samples and Extended Plays curated by Adam Moore (2025), Bow Arts 125 Shaftesbury Avenue Takeover. Photo Alberto Romano.
Adam Moore, Farther. Like a dream unfinished into ever (2023) performed at Samples and Extended Plays curated by Adam Moore (2025), Bow Arts 125 Shaftesbury Avenue Takeover. Photo Alberto Romano.