Blues Listening Session With Lamin Fofana and Moses Serubiri

As part of the exhibition BLUES at the Mishkin Gallery, the Goethe-Institut presents a listening session with Berlin-based musician and artist Lamin Fofana and curator Moses Serubiri. 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 and its afterlives.

BLUES is curated by Alaina Claire Feldman.

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).