Lamin Fofana

For Liverpool Biennial 2021, Lamin Fofana presented an audio-visual installation at The Lewis’s Building titled Life and Death by Water (2021). The project incorporates a new 12” vinyl record, Life and Death by Water, produced in collaboration with SAVVY Contemporary.

First presented as an audio-visual installation, Life and Death by Water takes inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! Du Bois’s Darkwater presents an alternate mapping of the interconnected global system of racial capitalism, while Philip’s staggering book-length poem recounts the legal proceedings which took place after the Zong massacre in 1781 – when the captain of the eponymous slave ship ordered 150 enslaved Africans to be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance money. The ship was owned by Liverpool merchants, whose crew acted to protect their interests. Through an immersive installation, Fofana uncovers this overlooked history, the horrors of the middle passage and the realities of racial capitalism.

Lamin Fofana is an artist and musician currently located in New York and Berlin. Fofana’s instrumental electronic music contrasts the reality of our world with what’s beyond and explores questions of movement, migration, alienation and belonging. Lamin’s overlapping interests in history and contemporary circumstances, and his practice of transmuting text into the affective medium of sound, manifests in multi-sensory live performances and large-scale minimal installations featuring original music compositions, field recordings and archival material. Lamin established the SCI-FI & FANTASY music imprint in 2012. Releases include Another World (2015); Brancusi Sculpting Beyonce (2018); and Black Metamorphosis (2019). Recent exhibitions and performances include Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany (2019); 57th Venice Biennale, Italy (2017); and Documenta 14, Germany and Greece (2017).

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