MENDI + KEITH OBADIKE
Book of Light
Sound-Light Performance
8:00 Artists Talk, Kresge Theatre
An explosion of light and imagery blasting onto the facade of CFA, accompanied by live performance of songs and poems inspired by historic, scientific, and mythic tales about light.
Mendi + Keith Obadike work collaboratively to make music, art, and literature, creating ethereal works rooted in African-American and African cultures, that address timely and relevant issues in beautiful and powerfully poetic ways. Book of Light, is an explosion of light, imagery and sound, with imagery blasting onto the facade of the College of Fine Arts building, and accompanied by a live performance of songs and poems inspired by historic, scientific, and mythic tales about light. The performance is about light itself, with images inspired by Mendi + Keith’s research into human bioluminesce and biophotonic microscopy. The use of color and aesthetics in scientific imagery inform the images; data found in the scientific studies was used to generate sounds for the performance. In the performance, Book of Light, Mendi + Keith play songs and poems, pulling from historic, scientific, and mythic tales about light. *In collaboration with Yongxin (Leon) Zhao’s Biophotonic Lab
MENDI + KEITH OBADIKE have exhibited and performed at The New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Their projects include a series of large-scale, public sound art works: Blues Speaker (for James Baldwin) at The New School, Free/Phase at the Chicago Cultural Center & Rebuild Foundation, Sonic Migration at Scribe Video Center & Tindley Temple, Philadelphia and Compass Song, an app for Times Square (commissioned by Times Square Arts). They have released recordings on Bridge Records and books with Lotus Press and 1913 Press. They have contributed sounds/music to projects by wide range of artists including loops for neo-soul singer D’Angelo’s first album and a score for playwright Anna Deavere Smith at the Lincoln Center Institute. They were invited to develop their first ‘opera-masquerade’ by writer Toni Morrison at her Princeton Atelier. Their museum exhibitions include the group shows Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966) at The Whitechapel Gallery in London, I Was Raised on The Internet at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art at The Whitney Museum of American Art. They were invited by the Netgain Partnership (Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and Open Society Foundations) to perform their work “Numbers Station” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Their other honors include a Rockefeller New Media Arts Fellowship, Pick Laudati Award for Digital Art, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Their recent projects include Cosmologies (for Two Voices) , a text-sound performance commissioned by Lévy Gorvy Gallery and Utopias: Seeking for a City, a sound installation commissioned by Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn. Mendi received a BA in English from Spelman College and a PhD in Literature from Duke University. She is a poetry editor at Fence Magazine and an associate professor of Writing and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. Keith received a BA in Art from North Carolina Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University. He is a professor in the College of Arts and Communication at William Paterson University and serves a digital media editor at Obsidian. Mendi + Keith serve as art advisors to the Times Square Alliance and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
