Art and jazz
Designing the festival visually
Artistic collaboration at Enjoy Jazz
The year 2021 marked the start of the cooperation between the Enjoy Jazz Festival and an artist with the aim of designing an art poster as a figurehead for the festival. The series is curated by art historian and journalist Maxi Broecking.
The Nigerian-Norwegian artist Frida Orupabo, whose works deal with the crimes of colonialism and their effects up to the present day, as well as with stereotypes of racism and gender, could be won for the opening. Orupabo's works have been shown in numerous exhibitions in museums, as well as at the art biennials in Venice and Saō Paulo.
In the course of this cooperation, the festival would like to invite artists who are inspired by jazz and improvised music to create their art or who reflect on their sound biography to design the artistic festival poster or to provide an existing motif for the design.
An accompanying exhibition by the artist is also planned, as well as the edition of a limited edition, the proceeds of which will be donated to charitable organizations.
The curator
Maxi Broecking (* 1969 in Berlin)
is a journalist for Die Zeit, Der Tagesspiegel, Taz, Kunstzeitung, Fono Forum, Jazz Thing, RBB and Byte FM as well as THE:ARTIST on the topics of jazz, improvised music and contemporary art. Since 2021 she is curator of the series Jazz + Kunst of the Enjoy Jazz Festival as well as founder of the platform THE:ARTIST, a digital space for articles and interviews with artists, researchers and curators on the future of art and art perception in relation to intersectionality, diversity and decolonization. Maxi Broecking lives with her family in Berlin.
The festival poster 2023
Zanele Muholi
Festival poster 2023
(Credit Zanele Muholi)Muholi, who describes herself as non-binary, is a visual activist internationally known for her engagement with the black queer body. In the form of various ongoing series as well as her/his best known series of self-portraits "Somnyama Ngonyama/Hail the dark Lioness" which was prominently shown at the Venice Biennale as well as at the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Photography in Paris, the National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavik and many other museums worldwide. Currently, her/his work can be seen at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SFMOMA, MUDEC in Milan, and the Lucerne Art Museum.
For this year's Enjoy Jazz poster, Zanele Muholi has created several self-portraits from this series.
Muholi was 22 years old when apartheid officially ended in 1994, but the structural experiences and consequences of racial classification and a heteronormative value system run deep. The self-portraits are a path of self-healing.
Thus, on Muholi's Instagram account, the hashtags #race_love_ gender_politics or even #selflove can be found again and again. The extent of postcolonial racism, which affects all areas of society, has painfully engraved itself into the souls and bodies of South Africa's black population.
In February 2021, Muholi established the "BaMu Arts Foundation/Muholi Arts Project" to bring arts and education to rural communities and to change the narrative of inherited devaluation and enable healing through creative expression and discursive thinking.
In 2022 Muholi founded the Muholi Art Institute in Cape Town to promote Black artists from the queer community. To this day, the Black women's and queer movement remains largely invisible as part of the Black civil rights movement. Muholi expands visual activism to include representation of the Black LGBTQIA+ movement, creating a universal narrative.
Muholi's works create visibility to bring about change in queerphobic spaces and document the realities of people whose lives are excluded as part of the canon. They raise the question of how self-empowerment can become effective and how power structures can be exposed and changed. In doing so, Muholi's works remain forms of perseverance, tenderness, and refuge in their radicalism, honesty, and pride.
The festival poster 2022
Iñaki Bonillas
(Credit Kyrre Skjelby Kristoffersen)
Festival poster 2022
(Credit Iñaki Bonillas)"Film music for a still image," is how the photo artist Iñaki Bonillas, born in Mexico City in 1981, calls the motif he worked on for the poster of this year's Enjoy Jazz Festival. It shows a man in the midst of soaring pigeons in St. Mark's Square in Venice, probably taken in the 1970s, capturing this brief moment that becomes a narrative, an imaginary film. The colors are faded, the image indistinct. It shows the artist's father and, after his early death, accompanied him through his childhood, as a portrait of a happy, playful moment and linked to the music that the father loved, whose record collection has accompanied Iñaki Bonillas ever since and which forms the soundtrack of this film score: Jazz. Bonillas is not a photographer in the usual sense. He, who calls himself an "attic photographer," works with photographic found objects that he places in a new context and links to the present.
Thus, memory becomes a possible explanation and redefinition of the present. His works have been shown at the Venice Biennale and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. To a large extent, his image archive is closely linked to his family history. For "Soundtrack for a Still," he asked friends who share his passion for music which jazz piece they would choose for this painting. As a result, the work was shown side by side five times, each time with headphones playing different music to accompany it, which, in the result of the acoustic shift in meaning, acted as if they were five different photographs. It was thanks to his father, he says, that he began to be drawn to jazz himself. Through his extensive music collection, he said, he began collecting records himself. He says that the work "Soundtrack For A Still" is about understanding who his father was and that he himself was able to approach jazz because this music was so important to him. As a connection of the past to the present, as the soundtrack of a still.
The festival poster 2021
Frida Orupabo
(Credit Kyrre Skjelby Kristoffersen)
Festival Poster 2021
(Credit Frida Orupabo)The 2021 festival motif comes from artist Frida Orupabo, one of the most exciting protagonists on the contemporary art scene. Born in 1986 in Sarpsborg, Norway, Orupabo now lives and works in Oslo. Her artistic practice consists of collecting media and personal images, which she digitally archives on her Instagram feed @nemiepeba
and transforms into analog collages.
In her art, Frida Orupabo addresses racism in a provocative and extraordinary way. The basic material for her digital collages: disturbing assemblages of image fragments from colonial archives and excerpts of U.S. films, in which she poses questions about race, family, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity by decontextualizing, defragmenting, and overlaying the images.
Her motif for the festival emerged from a superimposition of collage motifs from her Portikus exhibition in Frankfurt. Associations with experiences of oppression and violence, the colonial past and its connection with the still resulting pejorative perception of non-white skin color and non-Western cultures become visible as a network of fine ramifications. Orupabo herself experienced the intersectionality - also thematized at this year's festival - of multiple discrimination as a person of color due to her Nigerian roots, and as a woman.