Oh Adelaide (2010) is a single-channel video by British artist Sonia Boyce and sound artist Ain Bailey.
Oh Adelaide starts with the opening of the curtains onto the scene, where the presence of the singer, Adelaide, is in part covered by an incandescent mass that deprives the spectator of the view of her body. Furthermore, her performance, which consists mainly of a wordless vocal of the famous jazz standard Creole Love Call, is concealed by disturbing sounds. Adelaide appears as an ethereal figure on the stage and this sense of estrangement and dispossession is underscored by Bailey’s immersive and haunting soundtrack. The artist often describes this work as “a cross-generational dialogue that vacillates between activating the archive and a melancholic futurism”.
