Come Beautify the Night with Otis Mensah

Created by interdisciplinary artist and musician Otis Mensah, Come Beautify the Night combines avant-garde musical-form with traditional elements of rap-flow and cadence, reflecting on the body as landscape across seven movements. The forthcoming album and the film – which is currently on display in the Graves Gallery – mark a seminal evolution as Otis’ compositional debut, with an abstractionist approach to sound and form that obscures the borders between self and place. Beginning in the North of England and drawing to a close in Berlin, the colliding dark / light textures and tonal shifts of Come Beautify the Night inhabit the nature of transition and the rewriting home – teetering between rurality to metropolarity.

The “night” refers to that which is subdued and erased, while the act of “beautifying” exists as a ritual of resistance. The adornment of one’s self, the queering of gender, and the encryption of written and spoken language present themselves as oppositional modes of fierce defiance when one’s identity and sense of home are at stake.