Virtual Artist Talk: When The Party is a Protest

Saturday, July 17, 12:00–1:00 PM

FREE event, no registration needed

Click here for zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85762068065#success

Meeting ID: 857 6206 8065

Join Sadie Woods and Seed Lynn for a virtual artist talk for their current exhibition, Ghoema!

Ghoema (a Cape Malay drum and rhythm motif) is a study of carnival traditions in Cape Town, South Africa. As the drum centers the ceremony’s spirit, Gheoma centers communal memory archived in arts through the context of liberatory practices. Lynn and Woods chronicle their research-based artistic practices through photography, music and ephemera from the Cape Town Street Carnival. When The Party is a Protest is part discourse, part proposal, inviting the audience to question ‘how do you remember, how do you carnival?

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Ghoema, or drum, is a long term media project exploring the migration, history, and culture of the Malay people in South Africa’s Western Cape. The ghoema is associated with colorful rhythms and euphoric/altered states conjured through its hypnotic sound. It is the centerpiece of carnival performances created by slaves to mock their masters with encoded songs and later as a celebration of slavery abolition. For Seed Lynn and Sadie Woods, Gheoma stretches beyond representations of embodied memory and journeys through Diasporic traditions of ritual resistance, exploring memory itself as a radical and defiant act in the face of colonial occupation and oppression.

Seed Lynn has always heard the vulnerable story as the courageous one, without shame or stigma, without argument or doubt. Using custom, context, theory, and labor, Lynn promotes a healing practice that situates not just voicing this courage, but our capacity to hear it as a metric of personal and community health. Lynn’s proposal: We must work, sometimes fight, to be well.

More story worker than teller, Lynn surfaces the present, urgent, and necessary narratives threatened most by oppressive views and myths, questioning how the ways in which we remember ourselves shape our shared futures, shape possibility itself. Lynn exhibits a gift for unfolding and remaking these myths, forging precious and personal graces, when contact, in fact, results in confrontation.

The artist-activist of 20+ years calls Chicagoland home, while claiming communities of faith, place, and spirit across the US and Global South. He holds special regard among digital storytelling practitioners as both a POC executive and folk-media artist with a storied and published international portfolio, proudly naming The Gates Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, University of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools among clients and collaborators. To date, Seed and his team of Storyographers have seen their methodologies applied with in the contexts of health promotion, intervention, policy and advocacy, narrative justice, journalism, research, and education.

Sadie Woods is an award winning post-disciplinary artist, independent curator, and deejay. Her work focuses primarily on social movements, cultural memory, and producing collaborations within communities of difference. She also deejays under the moniker Afrodjia, focusing on diasporic Afro-Latin and -Caribbean music and culture.

Sadie has participated in national and international artist and curatorial residencies, including: ACRE; Arts + Public Life; Bemis Center for the Arts; Chicago Artists Coalition’s HATCH Projects; Comfort Station #pertodela, US/BR; Ecole du Magasin-Centre d’Art Contemporain, FR; High Concept Labs; Hyde Park Art Center; Independent Curators International, NY/SN; Ragdale Foundation; Terrain Exhibitions and Biennial. She has exhibited and featured her work at Chicago Cultural Center; Experimental Sound Studio; EXPO Chicago; Heaven Gallery; Hyde Park Jazz Festival; Krasl Art Center, MI; Lit & Luz Festival, US/MX; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; New Gallery of Modern Art, NC; Washington Project for the Arts, DC; Weinberg/Newton Gallery. Publications include Harald Szeemann Méthodologie Individuelle published by JRP Ringier with Le Magasin—Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, in collaboration with the Department of Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, London.

Sadie received her BA from Columbia College and MFA from The School of the Art Institute. She is a 2020 recipient of the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Esteemed Artist Award, the Co-Founder and Creative Director of The Petty Biennial, Co-Founder and Curatorial Consultant of Selenite Arts Advisory, Faculty at the School of the Art Institute, and Resident Deejay at Lumpen Radio 105.5FM and Vocalo 91.5FM in Chicago

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Tags: Chicago, Ghoema, Heaven Gallery, Illinois, Sadie Woods, Seed Lynn, West Town, When The Party Is A Protest