‘Rear View Mirror’
Ben Boswell, Willow Swan, Maria Bahrim, gazellota
17 April 2025
Bolding

Rear View Mirror comprises an evening of four performances of sonic art which explore nostalgia and alternative, introspective ways of looking.

Ben Boswell’s Hot Stuff is an audiovisual piece that looks at gay bars across London, New York, and Montreal. A short film shows old bars that exist in cities, away from the limelight, and the people and atmosphere inside, accompanied by a performance of a sonorous and evocative composition on the flugelhorn. Debuted at London Fashion Week, Hot Stuff is now in its second iteration and will be developed more in later shows throughout the summer.

Willow Swan will perform When I close my eyes to dream, I close my dreams to die on reconstructed organ pipes alongside a video work featuring scenes from club culture. Inspired by Strawberry Switchblade’s Rose McDowell, the work inhabits the void of dreamspace while reassessing contemporary rituals in the achievement of transcendence.

Maria Bahrim’s durational piece Variations on Space Negative questions the potential of single frequency tones as ‘sound object positives’ in relation to the negative remaining in their absence. The work combines sonic footage of 440hz frequencies activated in highly reverberative spaces, such as the stairwell at the Worlds End Estate in Chelsea, and the street-level parking under the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, accompanied by a series of 1-minute projections of visual footage from the sites of work. Part of Maria’s ongoing research into sonic architecture, the piece was developed from an initial collaboration with sound artists Jan St Werner and Kirill Vilshenko at the Royal College of Art in 2024.

After a long hiatus from movement performance due to her focus on sonic research and cultural production, gazellota will bring the body into her performance IteraciónNo01, projecting physical essays within landscapes of samples & original sound. Mixing and performing with illuminations live, gazellota presses for the need to witness craft-in-process in resistance to product centred logic. The work invokes everpresent threads of auto-ethnography and cycles of be-cumming.



Ben Boswell (b.1997) is an artist, musician & performer based in London. His shows combine orchestral instrumentation with electronics, live vocals, samples, and filmed video installation. His current practice is interested in the melancholy, rapture, and desire within the contemporary city landscape. Over the past year, Ben has performed across London, Bristol, and Paris. After a recent show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, he will be performing across the UK & in Europe this summer and just finished making his debut record.

Willow Swan is a London-based multidisciplinary artist working in performance, music, sculpture. Their work explores devotion, transformation, and collective care, blending the sacred with the everyday. With a background in metalwork and an interest in pipe organs, they create immersive sonic and sculptural experiences that engage ritual, memory, and sound.

Maria Bahrim (b.2000) is an architectural designer whose ongoing research into spatial behaviorology drives towards sonic resolutions. Alongside its primary architectural nucleus, their work ventures into performance, curation and sound design, all animating themes of contemporary relations with surveillance, viewership and the technological gaze, and a slight nostalgia for the vernacular. Maria is currently based in London and is a resident of ADS12 within the Royal College of Art School of Architecture since 2023, under the mentorship of Swiss practice Pa.LaC.E.

Luisa D. Rozo [Gazellota] crossfades between recordings from her lifetime’s auto-ethnographic researches and generated sounds as an internet fan-girl, in order to create landscapes and infrastructures that are weaved with her voice explorations of experimental Latin American folk song and rnb heartbreak melancholia.