For the Record

ifa Galerie Berlin
2 June - 30 September 2018

With Vivian Caccuri, Jace Clayton, Geraldine Juárez, Julio César Morales, and Christine Sun Kim

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 ones.

Tracks, albums and compositions conjure narratives from distant pasts, resurrect lost voices and invent virtual futures. Musical works – be it in the form of a vinyl record or as data streams that expand and travel across seas and oceans – record the movement of bodies, of fluctuating economies and of the transpositions of knowledge. They are also testament to acts of defiance and operate as tools to reconfigure spaces and systems.

For the Record features artists who utilize music as a site to articulate lived experiences and to question contemporary societal conditions under persisting imperial and capitalist enterprises. Moreover, the exhibition 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.