Democracy Sessions: Oliver Leith, Garland
Presented by MOCA and Wild Up
US Premiere
Saturday, October 3, 2026 at 3pm and 6pm
Tickets: $12 ($10 MOCA Members)
Location: WAREHOUSE at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

Democracy Sessions, ​a festival of music, art, performance, and happenings, returns in October 2026 for an expanded presentation taking place ​at cultural spaces across Los Angeles. Conceived ​by MOCA and the orchestral collective Wild Up (founded in Los Angeles in 2010)​ and ​first presented immediately following the 2024 US Presidential Election, this new iteration occurs at a moment shaped by censorship, polarization, and shifting public trust and ​again asks how art can function as a democratic practice--a means of gathering, listening, speaking, and acting together.

Developed by Wild Up in partnership with MOCA, REDCAT, and CalArts, and expanded through related programming independently conceived and presented by the Performance Art Museum, Clockshop, 2220 Arts + Archives, Human Resources, and Living Earth, Democracy Sessions 2026 is timed to align with the weeks leading up to the US midterm elections. The festival seeks to position music and art as a living civic practice and a space where free expression, cooperation, and collective action can be rehearsed in real time.

Democracy Sessions opens with the U.S. premiere of Oliver Leith’s (b. 1990, London, UK) Garland. Presented by MOCA and Wild Up, Garland is a large-scale work for orchestra and community chorus that features 130 performers arranged in a spectacular procession of music, movement, and sound. Originally commissioned by Bold Tendencies, UK, and created for their multi-story car park, the site-responsive piece will transform MOCA’s WAREHOUSE into both a stage and an instrument, with scale, architecture, and atmosphere becoming inseparable from the performance itself.

Alongside orchestra and massed voices, Leith constructs a sonic world from handmade instruments and everyday materials — tuned corrugated plastic straws, whirly tubes, button whistles, planks of wood, ceramic shards, carts, bicycles, scaffolding poles, and a horse connected to the chorus by a garland of bells.

Garland imagines democracy as something we do together: a procession, a public gathering, and a shared act of listening. Musicians, community voices, everyday objects, and the architecture of the space unite into a single sounding body. 

Oliver Leith is a London-based composer making acoustic music, electronic music, and video. 

He has received commissions from the London Sinfonietta, Festival Aix-en-Provence, the London Symphony Orchestra, Tanglewood Music Festival, Heidelberg festival, Musicon, Homo Novus/Valmiera theatre, and St John Smith’s Square among others. Leith has collaborated extensively with ensembles and performers including Apartment House, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Ives Ensemble, Exaudi, 12 Ensemble, Plus Minus, Mimitabu, Philharmonia Orchestra, An Assembly, Trio Catch, GBSR Duo, Loré Lixenberg, Explore Ensemble, Matthew Herbert, and John Harle.

Leith’s performances have been presented extensively across the UK at the Royal Festival Hall, Barbican Hall, Wigmore Hall, Kings Place, Royal Opera House, Aldeburgh, Huddersfield (HCMF), LSO St Luke’s, St Martin-in-the-fields, Horniman Museum, The Forge, CNSDMP (Paris), RCM, GSMD, Milton Court, Howard Assembly Room, The Place, Handel House, Mexican Embassy (UK and Tokyo), Liszt academy (Budapest), Maison du Canada (Paris), Howard Assembly and Leeds Lieder. Visual art collaborations are exhibited at The Museum of Western Australia, and recorded music is played on BBC Radio 3 and NTS radio.

Leith was the recipient of an Ivor Novello award in 2020, British Composer Award in 2016, and of a Royal Philharmonic Composition prize in 2014.

Credits

Democracy Sessions: Oliver Leith, Garland is presented as part of Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs.

Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs is organized by Alex Sloane, Associate Curator, and is produced by Amelia Charter, Producer of Performance and Programs, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles

This performance is made possible by generous endowment support from Wonmi & Kihong Kwon and Family.

Performances at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Performance with generous funding provided by Betsy Greenberg and The Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund.

Wonmi's WAREHOUSE Programs is founded by Wonmi & Kihong Kwon and Family.