GLOBAL CULTURES: A T KABE WILSON – HONOURMASTICS 6 JUNE 2026

Sat 6 June

West Court Jesus College

Join us at Jesus College, Cambridge, for a presentation and painting unveiling by Jesus College Artist in Residence A T Kabe Wilson, focused on his recent work about the memorialisation of names. Tickets are available below.

About the event

“What’s in a name?”, Shakespeare’s Juliet asked. In Honourmastics, the culmination of his work as 2025/26 Artist in Residence at Jesus College, A T Kabe Wilson hopes to provide an answer. In this colourful presentation Kabe will lead us on a journey of naming cultures and explain why his recent work disregards faces, and centres the proper name as the focus of a new mode of abstract portraiture. Through telling the story of how this style has developed, he hopes to unpick the difficulties of transliteration and translation, not only from one language or alphabet to another, but between different forms of artistic representation and (often conflicting) cultures of memorialisation. He will demonstrate the beauty of syncretism, and why names offer great possibilities for an artistic intervention that embraces a diversity of influences, from South African Ndebele mural art and the pazarlar of Istanbul, to North American bio-hacking and the satire of Laurence Sterne.

The presentation will end with the unveiling of Kabe’s painting for Jesus College, followed by a conversation between the artist and Gates Scholar Seetha Tan.

About A T Kabe Wilson

A T Kabe Wilson is the 2025/26 Artist in Residence at Jesus College, Cambridge.

His work, which spans a variety of media, regularly exists at the intersection between the visual arts and canonical literature, and he is best known for his experiments with European modernism. Alongside his residency at Jesus, he is working with The Laurence Sterne Trust to produce the book art piece Copywrong, the latest in his ongoing series of ‘conceptual translations’, to be exhibited at Shandy Hall in spring 2026.

About Seetha Tan

Seetha Tan is a filmmaker and current Gates Scholar completing her PhD in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

Her research explores postcolonial migration and identity formation in the UK; she is particularly interested in the relationship between cultural identity and everyday acts of storytelling, including through cooking. She has worked in both podcast and film and is interested in the role of creative mythologies in research and public engagement.

Cost: £0