Join ‘Shift: Music, Meaning, Context’ exhibiting artists Emeka Ogboh and Bani Abidi for a conversation about how contemporary art can recontextualize national anthems, opening questions about patriotism and cultural belonging.

This program accompanies ‘Shift: Music, Meaning, Context,’ an exhibition produced in collaboration between Goethe-Institut Chicago and The Museum of Contemporary Photography, currently on view at the Museum through August 6, 2023. ‘Shift’ explores how music changes in form and interpretation as it moves across time, bodies, and place.

This conversation will be moderated by Leah Gallant, Program Curator at the Goethe-Institut Chicago.

SPEAKER BIOS

Artist Emeka Ogboh connects to places with his senses of hearing and taste. Through his audio installations and gastronomic works, Ogboh explores how private, public, collective memories and histories are translated, transformed and encoded into sound and food. These works contemplate how auditory and gustatory experiences capture existential relationships, frame our understanding of the world and provide a context in which to ask critical questions on immigration, globalization, and post-colonialism. Ogboh has participated in numerous international exhibitions including documenta 14, (2017), Athens and Kassel, Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017), the 56th edition of La Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2015), and Dakar Biennale (2014).

Encompassing the mediums of video, photography and performance, Bani Abidi’s two-decade-long practice draws on both everyday and historical events to explore issues of nationalism and state power. Born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1971, Abidi studied painting and printmaking, earning a BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, in 1994. She later attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning an MFA in 1999. She completed residencies with the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2000), Fukuoka Art Exchange Program, Japan (2005), and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (2011–12). Her early engagement with video, beginning at the Art Institute, led to the incorporation of performance and photography into her work. These mediums have provided Abidi with potent, sometimes subversive means to address problems of nationalism—specifically those surrounding the Indian-Pakistani conflict and the violent legacy of the 1947 partition dividing the two countries—and their uneven representation in the mass media. She is particularly interested in how these issues affect everyday life and individual experience.

https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/sta/chi/ver/sft.html

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Tags: Bani Abidi, Emeka Ogboh, Goethe Institut, Goethe-Institut Chicago, Loop, MoCP, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Remaking the Anthem