Where have the arts gone ?

Even if world wide’s biggest museums have opened online platforms for virtual visits of their collections and audiovisual platforms have developed special programs for this confinement period, we feel disconnected from live experiences and social confrontation with art and culture.

While thinking about some connections between the actual world situation due to COVID-19 and the limited access to art and culture, we got inspired by some people and projects:

• Sudan Archives and her “Black Renaissance”

In an interview with Titel Thesen Temperamente this violist and vocalist Sudan Archives gives to see an impressive and inspiration character, ready to get rid of any kind of barriers in a musical but also societal way. As a woman with her own roots, she questions her background and the actual debates around it using a style that mixes traditional African music with soul, R&B and also electronic sounds, all together with her violin she self-taught herself.

Brittney Parks, the 25-year-old artist who records as Sudan Archives, speaks the way her music sounds — meandering passages that flutter and unravel, threading darkness and humor, creating novel avenues to fundamental truths.

Sudan Archives released her debut Athena last November, the album cover featuring Parks as a statue. She wanted to model herself after Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and war, aiming to replace the typical white bodies she would see in museums. “I knew I wanted [the album cover] to be a sculpture. I was traveling so much, seeing all these sculptures of white people. That led me to research all these goddesses. I just thought it would be cool if you google ‘Athena’ and you see me.”

Let’s take her as a lesson and enjoy this unusual time to teach ourselves an instrument we’ve always wanted to play or left aside… she creates – as she mentioned – an entirely new story in the places in between where no one else has explored.

 

 

Another example is the Turkish artist MK Yurttaş:

• Performistanbul – “In return”

 

The discovery of the project “In return” by the artist Mustafa Kemal Yurttaş (MK Yurttaş) has been like an echo to the issues we have started to deal with recently: how can art be taken out of traditional spaces like galleries, museums etc. in order to be accessible in times of crisis? And beyond this argument, how is solidarity implemented in times of a virus and how do trades (as services or goods) take place between the people in a period where no one knows exactly about the future?

From 01.02.2020 to 01.06.2020, the artist proposes to come into people’s houses and break the boundaries with accessing the arts by thinking about the opacities between the artist, the audience and the spaces/institutions.

He wants to come to your place, cook for you and he wonders what will you do in return.

Let’s live this experience by inviting him through this link: http://performistanbul.org/index.php/inreturn/