Somerset House Podcast
The Somerset House Podcast, shaped and sculpted by artists, explores original cultural ideas which connect listeners to the creative process. Each series goes behind the scenes at Somerset House to uncover the stories explored through our programme and creative community. As the home of cultural innovators, Somerset House connects creativity and the artist with wider society to produce unexpected outcomes and unexplored futures, intensifying creativity and multiplying opportunity to drive artistic and social innovation.
Episodes
The Process: Archive invites artists from our cultural programme and artist community to reflect on different works from the sonic archives and podcasts of Somerset House – from talks to soundscapes, performance to composition.
In this episode, we deep dive into the transformative power of cute, exploring what happens when shrines and pop devotion intersect with the irresistible force of cuteness.
Dot Alma is an artis...
From alternative modes of listening to live performance as a form of time travel, the Black political economy of music and the platform conditions of distribution, musician, curator and theorist, DeForrest Brown Jr. wants to discover new ways of relating to audio. In a world of noise and an oversaturated music industry, what new worlds might we discover if we reimagine how we make and listen to music?
In this sonic essa...
Artist Dana-Fiona Armour reveals what the sea snake knows about our changing oceans – and what it’s telling us about the climate emergency.
It’s animals like the sea snake – a vital but often neglected bioindicator of marine health – that can be a crucial lens to environmental change. With fragile eco systems, rising sea temperatures and decreasing salinity, what would it take to retune our...
For the first in The Process Archive sub-series we revisit three works from Assembly, Somerset House Studios experimental sound and music series, with artists Elaine Mitchener, Beatrice Dillon, Jennifer Walshe and Memo Akten.
Originating in 2018, Assembly emerged from the roots of sonic art and sound-based practice within the Studios resident artist community. To mark its fifth edition, we look back at some of the works that h...
Somerset House Studios artist Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom reimagines the drums as a time-travelling device across continent, history, and bodies.
A visual artist who has been learning the drums as part of an art project since 2020, Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom has long been interested in how we might reframe our perception of the drums. Its primal release of sound and movement. An ability to shape and reshape our sense of time. B...
Artist duo Cooking Sections blur the lines between art and activism with their installation, The Ministry of Sewers.
The Ministry of Sewers is an exhibit by artist duo Cooking Sections for the Folkestone Triennial. Inspired by the 1976 appointment of Dennis Howell as Minister for Drought – then Minister for Floods and Snows – it invites audiences to reimagine an alternative public service, using the voi...
Rhythm and Roots – Jennie Baptiste’s first major solo exhibition – opened at Somerset House in Autumn 2025, celebrating a three-decade career across music, fashion and youth identity. From the vibrating energy of London’s dancehall scene to the...
Sidsel Meineche Hansen is a Danish artist who is interested in how things are made, both through the lens of the industrial complex and material forms of craft. Her work looks at the ways gender is produced and mutated through the production of female gendered commodities in th...
Artists Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser (Hylozoic/Desires) go on a journey through the archives to unearth the story of the Great Hedge of India, a 4,000km long hedge grown by the British East India Company in the 1840s, to control the flow of salt across the continent. But despite being one of the longest of its kind in history, no visual trace of ...
We hear from Palestinian grower Mohammed Saleh whose life story offers a...
In this episode Shenece Oretha probes the ways the soil and clay are inspiring artists today, looking at ...
Across three episodes, presenter and Somerset House Studios artist Shenece Oretha traces the life cycle of soil, from it’s foundational role at the beginning of life with artist Asad Raza, through to its manifestation as one of the earliest creative materials, with ceramist and write...
For artist and filmmaker Topher Campbell, growing up as a Black queer man in 1980s and 90s Britain, the club provided a sanctuary from the judgement and hostility of mainstream society. It became a space for community, self-discovery, and, as a care leaver, a sense of home. As co-founder of the rukus! archive and curator of the exhibition...
Listen to the full episode: Apple | Spotify
Artist Imran Perretta was in his early 20s when the riots began in 2011. What started in London quickly spread across England, but it was the footage of a furniture shop set on fire in Croydon which stayed with Imran. Now, 13 years later, Imran revisits that ...
Artist Imran Perretta was in his early 20s when the riots began in 2011. What started in London quickly spread across England, but it was the footage of a furniture shop set on fire in Croydon which stayed with Imran. Now, 13 years later, Imran revisits that moment in a new commission for Somerset House Studios whi...
In this episode we join another artist commissioned for the Somerset House exhibition CUTE, Brooklyn based Sean-Kierre Lyons, to explore how cute characters have been used to tackle sensitive ideas from the middle ages on. In her practice, Sean-Kierre brings the grotesque and the cute together to approach challenging themes. Much of her work is insp...
Cute aesthetics have exploded into pop culture. We use filters to make ourselves look like cute cats, dot our texts with hearts and smiley faces and our phones ping with alerts from cartoon animals reminding us to study French or change energy suppliers. Brands have been using cute images to sell us things since the dawn of advertising but with the rise of s...
Prem Sahib’s new sound performance for Assembly, Alleus, takes a speech by former Home Secretary Suella Braverman and renders it into a new form through layers of processing and rep...
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