(REVIEW) ‘Bold. Bright. Unapologetic. Free.’ The synaesthetic world of Adéráyọ̀

Hussein Mitha encounters Adéráyọ̀’s Glasgow in tangled networks, shimmering thread and the transcendent city. 

Adéráyọ̀’s 2025 film Dissonance tells of their arrival in Glasgow, a city of porosity and flux. Through soft slow piano, vocalising, ethereal music, we watch the artist moving into a tenement flat, placing throws over their furniture and lovingly petting their cat. They wander the city, ideating a vision of the self as a performer in Glasgow’s Queer art scene. They fixate on a poster for a club night: deep blues and purples wash over what looks like a tangled network of lines: a complex image, weaving together lots of threads. Senses are overdetermined, transcended. The film moves through media as a way of finding expression — music, dance, film, movement across the city, becoming part of its dissonant, itinerant rhythms.

As Adéráyọ̀ moves around the city, chance encounters become a means of building together a defiant and proud aesthetic — a confluence of artists. Forging pathways through the blurry nights they birthed ‘Resonate', a live exhibition that showcased POC artists across music, performance and visual arts, and ran a club night called Ecstasy. 

Their forthcoming event, Synesthesia, is the culmination of this practice— an 8-hour mini festival showcasing 24 artists from disciplines that touch on all the senses in a way. From music and painting to dance and rave culture. Adéráyọ̀’s work is generous. It paves the way for others. It is itself pride in the self, as a queer Black individual, and a beacon for others to collectivise in the fire of each other. To be opalescent, shimmering, transcendent, synaesthetic, in the face of a grey and hostile era, which we must all break through in order to get free. 

The city is home. The city is grey. The city contains fire. The city looks after you. The city is hostile. You are an agent in the city, you move around it in your own way. The city is music, dance, looped, recursive, has its own currents. The city is curiosity, joyousness, eros. You love to bring people together. You sit with your cat in the rooms you have made home. You are not afraid of colour, but others are. You contemplate the grey. The orange-black night. You feel free.

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Text: Hussein Mitha

Published: 10/07/25