BLUES

About

The Mishkin Gallery presents BLUES, an exhibition by Sierra Leone-born, Berlin-based musician and artist Lamin Fofana. Fofana’s music is a conduit for engaging with an array of issues involving blackness, migration, displacement, and race through collective listening. The exhibition centers on a trilogy of sound works comprising the albums Black Metamorphosis, Darkwater, and Blues that engage with seminal texts by Sylvia Wynter, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Amiri Baraka to reflect on historical and epistemological trajectories of contemporary social and political thought through the lens of Black Studies. These works will be presented alongside videos and photographs by Fofana and his collaborators Jim C. Nedd and Nicolas Premier. 

Fofana creates spaces for contemporary black life in the West that are informed by his interest in history and the sonic and “allow for dreaming and imagining other ways of being” which foreground non-linear thinking and experience. Mishkin Gallery will be the main site of the exhibition, with additional elements such as posters and sounds spiraling outwards through the College campus and into the city. Aiming for both physical and emotional resonance, the works attempt to challenge authoritative forms of representation and communication while drawing upon the artists’ personal experiences of diaspora, the coming and going of communities. Throughout the exhibition, the Gallery will hold live music performances, talks, readings, and listening sessions to collectively think through what Christina Sharpe calls “wake work”, living with and attending to the paradoxical history of slavery. 

BLUES is curated by Alaina Claire Feldman. The exhibition was made possible by the Baruch College Fund and the George and Mildred Weissman School of Arts and Sciences. Additional support was provided by Hedwig Feit and the Schindler-Lizana Fund for Latin American Arts and Culture, and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. 

About the Artists:

Lamin Fofana is an electronic music producer and artist based in Berlin, Germany. Fofana’s music contrasts the reality of our world with what is beyond it, and explores questions of movement, migration, alienation and belonging. Fofana’s overlapping interests in history and the present, and his practice of transmuting text into the affective medium of sound, manifests in multisensory live performances and installations featuring original music compositions, field recordings and archival material. Fofana established the SCI-FI & FANTASY music imprint in 2012. Releases include Another World (2015); Brancusi Sculpting Beyonce (2018); and Black Metamorphosis (2019). Recent exhibitions and performances include Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany (2019); 57th Venice Biennale, Italy (2017); and Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece (2017). 

Jim C. Nedd lives and works in Milan, Italy. Nedd is an Afro-Colombian interdisciplinary storyteller, involved in sonic environments and visual arts. Founder of the experimental band Primitive Art alongside Matteo Pit, Nedd also operates as a photographer in both advertising and editorial projects, and as part of the Toiletpaper collective assisting Pierpaolo Ferrari. He is currently studying the Colombian tradition of Picós, profusely decorated sound systems that animate street parties on the Atlantic coast. The history of Picós can be traced back to the 1960s, yet its roots are deeper, originating during the time of slavery routes, when coastal cities like Barranquilla and Cartagena played a central role as access points in the trade. 

Nicolas Premier is a Franco-Congolese artist living and working in Paris. His work questions the ways of inhabiting the earth, our bodies and our imagination based on African and Afro-diasporic experiences and representations. In 2004 he co-founded Africa is the Future, a transmedia project that explores the Imaginary as a matrix of possibilities to interrogate modernity and its primordial taboos through African and afro-diasporic experiences and their representations. Selected works include Regular Man (2010); Our Poetry (2012); Africa Is The Future Magazine Covers (2015); Style (2017); Misericordia (2019); and Black Metamorphosis (2019). He has recently exhibited at EOTO in Berlin, Germany (2018), and Institut Français in Stuttgart, Germany (2019).