Events/Openings

With Vivian Caccuri, Jace Clayton, Geraldine Juárez, Julio César Morales with Discos Unicornio, NON and Christine Sun Kim
Curated by Bhavisha Panchia
Assistant Curator: Krisztina Hunya

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 pursuits. Music conjures narratives from distant pasts, resurrects lost voices and invents virtual futures. Musical works record the movement of bodies, of fluctuating economies and of the transpositions of knowledge. They are testament to acts of defiance and operate as tools to reconfigure spaces and systems.
The exhibition For the Record features artists who utilize music as a discursive site to articulate lived experiences and to question contemporary societal conditions under persisting colonial, imperial and capitalist enterprises.

The collective NON uses sound and (experimental) music to open up dialogues about autonomy, authorship and production by black artists. Their compilation trilogy, alongside a selection of albums, publications, and merchandise highlight their shared priority to confront hegemonic systems. 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’ 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’ 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.