Collateral Echoes

Baff Akoto's Collateral Echoes is running at QUAD in the Cathedral Quarter, and it's one of those shows that asks you to sit with some heavy stuff. It's an immersive solo exhibition that pulls together XR, moving image, and sound to look at memory, grief, and justice. Akoto works across film, installation, and spoken word, and he's built this one around the Black and migrant Britons who've been killed after police contact since 1969. He names them — Roger Sylvester, Sean Rigg, David Oluwale, Leon Patterson — and gives them space rather than letting them stay as headlines.

The show draws on both documentary and narrative film, mixing archive material with performance and spoken word. There's spoken prose by Paapa Essiedu and poetry by the late Benjamin Zephaniah, so the voices you hear aren't just Akoto's. He was raised in London and Accra, and he frames the work in dialogue with cultural theorists like Paul Gilroy and the late Stuart Hall, which gives the whole thing a bit of a theoretical backbone to lean on. Stella Dadzie wrote about the exhibition, with Nana Opoku and Gail Lewis.

It's produced by Recurring Dreams and supported by the BFI Doc Society Fund, National Lottery Funding, and the Ford Foundation. After its time here, it's set to travel the UK, with stops at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, and Birmingham Open Media.

It launched on 26 September and runs until 10 January, so there's plenty of time to catch it if you can't make it this week. It's free to visit and you don't need to book, which makes it easy to just drop into when you're in town. You'll find it at QUAD Gallery, Market Place, Cathedral Quarter, Derby DE1 3AS.