Chapter 1

Music is produced in specific cultural contexts and constitutes a fundamental basis for forming personal and collective identities. It symbolically connects us to places and cultures, helping to preserve histories of migrations and displacements of peoples across old empires, colonial regimes, and new global capitalist pursuits. It conjures narratives from distant pasts, resurrects lost voices and invents virtual futures. Musical works record the movement of bodies, fluctuating economies and 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 utilise music 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 the existing western bias of music production to make available different audio software based on nonwestern 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.

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. 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.

Bhavisha Panchia is a grant holder of the programme Curators in Residence of KfW Stiftung in cooperation with ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen). The programme offers promising emerging 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 organisation. The residency’s purpose is to raise critical awareness of postcolonial discourses and encourage intellectual engagement with cultural heritage.