For the Record

Vivian Caccuri, Jace Clayton, Geraldine Juárez, Christine Sun Kim and Julio César Morales with Discos Unicornio

Curated by Bhavisha Panchia

Music is produced in specific cultural contexts and constitutes a fundamental basis for the formation of personal and collective identities. It symbolically connects us to places and cultures, helping preserve histories of migrations and displacements of peoples across old empires, colonial regimes, and new global capitalist ones.

Tracks, albums and compositions conjure narratives from distant pasts, resurrect lost voices and invent virtual futures. Musical works—be it in the form of a vinyl record or as data streams that expand and travel across seas and oceans—record the movement of bodies, of fluctuating economies and of the transpositions of knowledge. They are a testament to acts of defiance and operate as tools to reconfigure spaces and systems.

For the Record features a selection of albums, artworks and installations by artists who utilize the sonic as a discursive site to articulate lived experiences and to question contemporary societal conditions under persisting colonial, imperial and capitalist enterprises.

Jace Clayton’s interdisciplinary project, Sufi Plug Ins, intervenes into existing western bias of music production to make available different audio software based on non-Western musical concepts. Geraldine Juárez’s work focuses on media-technologies and their role in the construction of dominant epistemic and economic narratives. In the vinyl record Wealth Transfer she uses the pattern of stock market fluctuations as a musical waveform to highlight high frequency trading and the abstraction of global trade. Vivian Caccuri uses installation and performance to analyse the impact of sound on social and cultural formations; in Talking Machine she charts the emergence and trajectory of Brazil’s vinyl industry. Julio César Morales’s work investigates migration and underground economies, particularly responding to US-Mexico relations through music, video and installation, while Christine Sun Kim attends to the material relationship between sound and the everyday that share inherent ties to social experiences.

Following the words of Jacques Attali, music reflects the construction of society, and is a way of perceiving the world altogether. Yet listening to these musical registers involves the allocation of attention and awareness. The task of listening requires that we are present and humble to allow the sounds of our surroundings and others to be heard. Under this premise, the exhibition asks: what are the limits of listening and who are we willing to listen to? Moreover, in what ways can listening also espouse collective consciousness, experiences and alliances? For the Record turns to listening as an act of mindfulness: paying attention to neglected stories and experiences, while also creating spaces in which re-imagination can occur. The exhibition thus lends itself to fostering conditions for listening that extend and push the limits of understanding and sharing.

Curator Bhavisha Panchia is a grant holder of the program “Curators in Residence” of KfW Stiftung in cooperation with ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen). The program offers promising up-and-coming curators from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia the opportunity to spend three months in Berlin, thus promoting intercultural and discursive exchange in exhibition organization. The purpose of the residency is to raise critical awareness of postcolonial discourses, as well as to encourage intellectual engagement with cultural heritage in relation to contemporary art. The grand holders design exhibitions which will be shown at ifa-Galerie Berlin. Following an open call, Bhavisha Panchia has been selected by the jury: Nicola Müllerschön, Julia Grosse, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet and Alya Sebti.

Accompanying Events:
Cumbia Crossfades
With DJs Julio César Morales, Josh Kun and Ali Hasan aka Nar
Friday, June 1, 2018, 11pm / ausland, Lychener Strasse 60, 10437 Berlin, Germany
A US-Mexico-Germany cumbia mix of undocumented sounds that explore movement and migration across borders

Radical Discounts
Artist Talk with Jace Clayton
Friday, June 8, 2018, 7pm / ifa-Galerie Berlin, Linienstraße 139/140, 10115 Berlin
What if the radical potential (if any) of music exists not in its performance and consumption, but in how it is or isn’t archived? Jace Clayton (New York), artist and writer, also known as DJ/rupture, will explore this notion using examples that range from Julius Eastman and Lee Lozano’s conceptual hostilities to black radicality under the banner of brand sponsorships.