First Look: Red Bull Music Academy Leeds

A new exhibition in Leeds captures the energy and urgency of grime

Feature | 07 Sep 2016

This year, the Red Bull Music Academy UK tour comes to Liverpool and Leeds for the first time. Rising stars of the local music scene will join international names in a programme of shows, club nights, workshops, lectures and more across both cities in October.

In Leeds, there's a particular focus on grime – appropriate for a city that's led the way in the form outside London. The final stop on the 32-date tour, RBMA Leeds opens with Kano, one of the scene's originators, in conversation with i-D magazine's Hattie Collins. They'll be discussing grime's relationship with documentation and photography, before giving attendees a first look at Collins' new exhibition, An Eye on Grime, which brings together a diverse range of photographers who have followed the scene since its inception. Along with artists including Risky Roadz and Ewen Spencer, the exhibition includes work by photographer Olivia Rose, who as worked with Collins on a new book, This Is Grime – a 224-page oral and visual history of grime narrated by members of the scene itself. 

Presenting new portraiture and documentary imagery from Rose alongside insights from grime's pioneers into the movement's 15-year development, the book is the first publication to collect this kind of history of the scene and lands at a time when grime is resurgent, with Croydon's Stormzy enjoying global success and one of its first big stars, Skepta, back in the charts. 


A Conversation with Kano, Globe Road Car Park, Leeds, 27 Oct, 6pm, £5

An Eye on Grime exhibition, Globe Road Car Park, Leeds, 27-30 Oct (opening night 7.30pm-10.30pm), free

This Is Grime is published 8 Sep by Hodder & Stoughton

RBMA Leeds, 27-30 Oct

http://uktour.redbullmusicacademy.com