In association with camra and collaborating curator Arjun Shankar, Ethnographic Terminalia presents:
Bad Friday Goes to Africa
In August of 2012, Arjun Shankar and Mariam Durrani accompanied Dr. John Jackson and Dr. Deborah Thomas from the University of Pennsylvania, Cape Town filmmaker Kurt Orderson of Azania Rising Productions, the Rasta band Ancient Vibrations and Rasta elders to screen the film Bad Friday to the Rasta diaspora in three cities: London, Cape Town, and Johannesburg.” Mariam and Arjun collaborated on documenting the journey including the films “Beating as One: The Music of Ancient Vibrations” and “Rasta Rights and Reparations: Bad Friday Tour.”
This installation seeks to create a novel sensory re-creation of the journey, juxtaposing photographs from the events with scrolling transcriptions of community member commentary and audio footage from the Ancient Vibrations musical performances. Together these pieces provide partial perspectives on how we make sense of transnational movements of people and ideas, with a specific focus on how diverse sensory processes challenge perceptions and normative representations of Rastafarian life, values, and culture.
Video, transcriptions, photographs, and audio
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The Bureau of Memories: Archives and Ephemera is a thematic reflection on the archive and its discontents. Washington’s identity as the seat of American political power is amplified through its role as the locus of its own memorialization. Where there is history, there is haunting. By drawing on the archive’s unnerving, uncanny, and ephemeral specters, this exhibition is an effort to re-imagine and reposition archives as sites which not only have the capacity to produce and contest historical memory, but also generate significant gaps and blind spots.