Ben Selig’s ‘Sound Clash’ at Frieze London 2024

Sound Clash is the first iteration of Ben Selig’s project exploring place-making in east London. Comprised of three sound stations across Frieze London, Sound Clash draws from Jamaican sonic practices to consider our relationship to land amid ongoing gentrification, dislocation and submerged local stories in east London. 

Sound Clash roots the two sites of V&A East in Hackney Wick and Stratford at the centre of this sonic investigation. Incorporating oral testimonies and archival recordings, Selig’s soundscapes shift unsettlingly between east London and Jamaica, drawing our attention to the land’s capacity to hold memory and enable reconnection. 

During Jamaica’s fight for independence in the 1960s, speakers placed high in the treetops signalled that a neighbourhood was having a party. People travelled from one town to the next, crossing parish boundaries, following the sound. The emergence of dub, a Jamaican musical style, saw engineers use mixing as an instrument of spontaneous composition and improvisation, de- and re-constructing the original structure of a song. Contouring between sonic anticipation through glimpses of familiar song (echo) and a sense of longing induced by the sound’s decay (reverb), dub engineers created moments of repair, where the dispossessed reconnected with ancestral ways of being with the land. 

Visitors to Frieze are invited to listen to soundscapes that connect to the timber trade between Jamaica, London’s docklands and Hackney Wick and early submarine telecommunications between the UK and Jamaica in the 1870s, with manufacturing roots in the India Rubber Gutta Percha Company in London’s Docklands.

Ben Swaby Selig is the 2022 Frieze x Deutsche Bank ‘Emerging Curators’ Fellow at V&A East. Selig has collaborated as sound artist and curator with filmmaker and photographer Hannah Oliver for Sound Clash. 

Sound Clash features

East Bank Voices (Community Oral Histories Project), oral testimonies

Gary Stewart (Co-founder of Dubmorphology), consultant 

Trevor Mathison (Co-founder of Dubmorphology), consultant

Dark Energy Studios, production studio

Phoenix Yemi, poet

National Library of Scotland, Ordnance Survey Maps

Further Information 

Frieze London and Frieze Masters, 9 – 13 October 2024, The Regent’s Park.

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^{Main image: Ben Selig, Soundclash, 2024 (Frieze DB Fellowship, Frieze London 2024). Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy Linda Nylind / Frieze}