JAYKOE: ANAM CARA REMIX

Exhibition 18–26 April 2025 | Opening event: Thursday 17 April 6-8pm

Opening hours vary:

18 April: Closed for Good Friday
19 April: 12-5pm
20 April: Easter Sunday Closed
21 April: Bank Holiday Closed
22-25 April: 10-2pm
26 April: 12-5pm

The final exhibition from Metroland Cultures’ Peer to Peer 2024/25 cohort from Brent based artist JAYKOE.

Metroland Cultures is delighted to present Anam Cara Remix (Shebeen I / Pirate Station), a new site-responsive installation by London-based artist JAYKOE, developed during a Peer-to-Peer residency in Kilburn. Drawing on layered personal histories and broader cultural lineages, the exhibition meditates on how fleeting moments of connection—often in marginal or overlooked spaces—can foster resilience, kinship, and new cultural imaginaries.

The work emerges from three formative encounters that trace the artist’s own narrative against wider diasporic and colonial contexts:
– A visit to the Delfina Foundation prompted reflections on the legacy of the artist’s grandfather, who migrated from Ireland to London, and the informal social spaces he cultivated.
– A journey to a famine graveyard in Kerry, Ireland, became a visceral confrontation with the long shadow of colonial trauma.
– The artist’s early experiences as a pirate radio DJ in Stonebridge, Brent, offered an initiation into London’s polyphonic cultural soundscape, where community was forged through rhythm, resistance, and airwaves.

The exhibition is presented across two interconnected spaces:

The Shebeen Space invokes the intimate back room of a Portobello Road shop once transformed by the artist’s grandfather into a shebeen—a space of hospitality and refuge for those excluded from public life due to racial discrimination. Central to this room is a table from that era, onto which is projected aerial footage of the Irish famine graveyard. This potent juxtaposition bridges personal memory and historical rupture, proposing the shebeen as both a vessel of survival and a site of future possibility.

The Main Gallery hosts a spatial sound installation: an open circle of speakers surrounds two screens showing a layered moving-image work. Combining archival fragments, documentary excerpts from Brent and the Irish diaspora, and abstract visual compositions, the video is underscored by a constellation of percussion instruments from around the world. These instruments will be activated in a live performance at the exhibition’s opening, with traces of sound resonating in the space throughout the exhibition’s run. The installation becomes a sonic commons, echoing the artist’s upbringing in London where cassettes, pirate stations, and street rhythms formed a language of belonging across cultural boundaries.

Anam Cara Remix continues JAYKOE’s investigation into rhythm as a unifying force and a means of radical co-presence. Building on the artist’s previous work Drums & Base (Brent Biennial, 2020), this exhibition amplifies a vision of sound as a democratic medium—where voices, no matter their origin, can coexist and be heard.

This is the ninth exhibition platforming the work of Metroland Cultures’ Peer-to-Peer artists, where the gallery is used to test new work or as a site of further production.

About JAYKOE

JAYKOE is an artist based in Brent working across disciplines including installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, and video.⁠

His work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally including Muralica, New York (2022); Rome Art Week (2018); ‘Filtered’ Lubomirov / Angus-Hughes Gallery, London (2017); Battersea Art Station, Battersea Arts Centre, London (2015); ‘Artists Film’ British Film Institute, London and Singapore Art Fair (2014); ‘Screen City’, Rogaland Kunstsenter, Stavanger, Norway and ‘Nord Art’, Kunstwerk Carlshutte, Germany (2013); ‘Feeling the Pressure’, Rhyl Museum, Wales and ‘KISS THE FUTURE’, Schwartz Gallery, London (2012); ‘VIDEOKILLS’, Homebase, Berlin (2010).

JAYKOE is part of Metroland Culture’s 2024/5 Peer-to-Peer cohort.

More on at Metroland…

Metroland Exhibitions Programme 2024/25

A look at the exhibitions coming up in our gallery.

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The Kilburn Print Workshop is a commission with artist Heiba Lamara dedicated to community publishing and print and design education.