Christian Nyampeta solo project at Storefront for Art and Architecture

Thu, Apr 8 - Sat, May 8  2021

Storefront for Art and Architecture

Storefront for Art and Architecture presents A Long Evening with Christian Nyampeta from April 8 – May 8, 2021.

This extended meta-concert at Storefront for Art and Architecture spatializes artist Christian Nyampeta’s recent album, An Evening with Christian Nyampeta. Over the course of the last decade, Nyampeta has been making musical experiments as a way to commemorate the shifts caused by major events: the Fukushima nuclear disaster, police shootings, the intensification of tyrannical regimes, and the current pandemic, to name a few. Each track emerges from Nyampeta’s intimate act of seeking the company of artists, musicians, theorists, and other figures. He mixes their ideas with his own and translates these allusive collaborations into sonic compositions. In doing so, he imbues them with what he calls a sociography of emotions, collectivizing personal experiences into structures of feelings.

Installation view of A Long Evening with Christian Nyampeta. Courtesy of Storefront for Art and Architecture

A Long Evening with Christian Nyampeta, like its namesake album, is presented during a brief hiatus in the regular course of operating, born as an impromptu act of solidarity. It stretches that brief period of time that sits between day and night, between public and private, between outside and inside, between what the world is and what it could be. Offering a time zone of respite from the exhaustion, loss, grief, and conflict of our current era, it instead imagines a moment of belonging, joy, generosity, and creation in the face of an ever challenging world. In the process, Nyampeta asks a crucial question that provokes a more hopeful future: how do we rest together?

Installation view of A Long Evening with Christian Nyampeta. Courtesy of Storefront for Art and Architecture

About the Artist

Christian Nyampeta lives nearby Storefront, from where he organizes programs, exhibitions, screenings, performances, and pedagogical experiments in New York, the Netherlands, London, and beyond. His 2018 film Sometimes It Was Beautiful will be premiered in the US at the Guggenheim Museum on April 30th, 2021 in a solo exhibition curated by Xiaoyu Weng.

On Maintenance

A Long Evening is presented as part of On Maintenance, Storefront’s year-long interim program in the midst of the global pandemic. The program introduces an interjection and a moment of pause in our previously scheduled programming to address aspects of maintenance and care, exploring what it means to both sustain and rehaul our spaces, our social and political systems, and our bodies and minds.

Credits

A Long Evening with Christian Nyampeta. Organized by Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2021.