CDJs are Instruments: Live DJ sets by Basel Abbas and chukwumaa

Join us at e-flux on Thursday, September 29, at 7:30pm for CDJs are Instruments, a music event featuring experimental DJ sets by Basel Abbas and chukwumaa, followed by a talk and Q&A with the artists led by Gavilán Rayna Russom. CDJs are Instruments stems from a conversation Basel Abbas, chukwumaa, and the curator Sanna Almajedi had about the need for more spaces for DJs to experiment with their equipment to an in-person audience outside of a club and dance setting. The conversation touched on Japanese listening bars, CDJs as samplers, turntablism, and music in art spaces. This event will be part of an ongoing series where DJs are invited to explore their style and push the boundaries of their instrument.

Basel Abbas works mostly with artist Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body, and virtuality. Across their works, they probe a contemporary landscape marked by a seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless “present,”  one that is shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. Often reflecting on ideas of non-linearity in the form of returns, amnesia, and deja vu, and in the process unfolding the slippages between actuality and projection (fiction, myth, wish), what is, and what could be. Largely, their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, and objects, and recasting them into altogether new “scripts.” The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, and material possibilities of sound, image, text, and site, taking on the form of multimedia installations and live sound/image performances.  

chukwumaa (aka lawd knows) is an artist, musician, and DJ born in Lagos, Nigeria and raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland. His work includes soft sculptures, performances, and other media experiments about liminal characters, Igbo trickster myths, and non-linear narratives. He has performed and exhibited at MoMA PS1, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Deli Gallery, and The Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College. In 2018, chukwumaa toured live electronic music performances across North America and Europe, both as supporting DJ for MHYSA and as one half of SCRAAATCH with E. Jane. chukwumaa received a BA in Studio Art from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania where he received the Charles Addams Memorial Prize, and recently attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. As part of SCRAAATCH, chukwumaa was a 2020-2022 College Fellow in Media Practice at Harvard University. He will be returning to Harvard in the Spring to teach a course on sound and sculpture.

Gavilán Rayna Russom’s visionary artistic career reverberates expansively at the multiple intersections between experimental and dance-floor sounds. Rayna’s creative arc began when she was still in high school—DJing dance parties and distributing home-produced drone and noise tapes—and has carried her through a long-standing relationship with New York’s DFA Records and critically acclaimed releases for LIES, Nation, Curle, LuxRec and Ecstatic Recordings, as well as the founding of her own label Voluminous Arts.

e-flux music is curated by Sanna Almajedi.

Accessibility      

–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.     

–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.    

–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

​​For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.