Night follows night,

Night follows night, and the two and three-stringed instruments talk to each other is a multi-modal, multi-sensory assembly that moves across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Taking inspiration from polyphonic collectives and embodied ritual practices, it brings together the resonant works of Jasleen Kaur, Christian Nyampeta & Kivu Ruhorahoza, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Skeena Reece, and Constantina Zavitsanos.

Drawing its title from a poem penned by Hafez Shirazi, Night follows night shifts attention away from representational discourse towards practices of embodiment, to accommodate emergent aesthetic forms in which song is lament, food is evidence, poetry is history, and objects speak. This assembly creates space for practices of trans-temporal interlocution, interruption, eruption and prophecy. It asks: how can we move beyond exhibitionary formats towards spaces of polyvocal collaboration, plural assembly and fugitive sociality?

Following a new performance work by Skeena Reece on October 29, the assembly continues with a day long program of performances, listening sessions, screenings, and presentatons at the Reliance Theatre, at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

The assembly begins with a screening of Constantina Zavitsanos’s All the time (audible) (2019/26), a newly produced and always in-progress, polyphonic open captioned video that makes sonic the silent captions for otherwise infrasonic works in the artist’s practice. All the time remixes textual fragments and folds, the ocular and oracular, and questions of in/capacity—this audible cut crosses two times in love letters and notes on space-time. The work thinks with and against the clarity of translation and its accompanying presumptions of discrete, sensorial arrangement. Opacity and occlusion trouble the screen, offering a space and time where even the always open ear need not hear, and where vision may be best with eyes closed. 

Jasleen Kaur’s lecture performance Over Here–Over There (2026), departs from Supra (2026), her recently commissioned work for the 59th Carnegie International. Kaur extends the themes of memory, trans-temporal sound and intergenerational interlocution to move between scalar registers, considering how historical events resonate across larger social and political structures—borders, beliefs, nation-states, inherited systems of power—and within the intimacy of domestic life and relationships. She describes this as an engagement with “the systems and frameworks we live within and feel through” and traces how they reverberate through the body, breath, and act of collective listening.

Echoing throughout the assembly, is the refrain of ancestors, rituals, and objects that speak. Kivu Ruhorahoza and Christian Nyampeta present their film Whispers (2025), a cinematic meditation on the poem “Les Souffles” penned in 1947 by Birago Diop in which the Senegalese poet invites us “to listen more often to things than beings.” The film moves between scenes of everyday life in Dakar and the registers of the living and the dead, a meditation on Diop’s insistence that ancestors are never gone but only transmute into other forms.

Night follows night draws to a close with a presentation by Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa on his ongoing series Séance for Extinct Species of Birds. Informed by a series of participatory performances held with students, artists and community members across Emily Carr University of Art + Design, UBC and the Western Front in the weeks preceding the assembly, Ramírez-Figueroa’s presentation extends his broader artistic practice in which sculptural installation, performance and dreamlike imagery create encounters with historical violence, displacement and resistance. Through gesture, invocation, and theatrical transformation, he asks how we might listen across species and temporalities to those who are no longer with us, and how imagination might allow us to form connections where direct access, evidence or language have been lost. In this sense, absence is not an end point, but a space from which other forms of presence, memory and relation might emerge. Ramírez-Figueroa reminds us that “Everything is in the world of vision and dreams.”