Notes for Tomorrow
Notes for Tomorrow is an exhibition conceived by ICI, featuring artworks selected by curators from around the world to reflect on a new global reality ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this cultural moment of transition, each work is a source of inspiration from the recent past and a guiding perspective for the future.
As part of this project Sharmila curated Amrita Hepi Soothsayer Serenades.
Amrita Hepi
(b. 1989, Townsville of Bundjulung and Ngapuhi territories, Australia; based in Melbourne)
Soothsayer Serenades, 2020
6-7 song playlists, updated weekly
Courtesy the artist
Amrita Hepi is a dancer and choreographer with an interdisciplinary practice. In Soothsayer Seranades, she invites collaborators to develop playlists accompanied by provocations to move which are released at 4pm every Wednesday via the music streaming service Spotify. This format provides insights into how the COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated ways of rethinking how art can be experienced and distributed across place and time to transcend geographical and physical boundaries. The pandemic has highlighted how the internet and free social media platforms have provided connectivity during a time when we have been estranged from friends, family, community and workplaces.
The playlists in Soothsayer Seranades encourage listeners to actively participate, to reach out, and enable others to move in the shared moment of its release. The physicality of dance and the sensory qualities of music provide an experience of embodiment that either counters the isolating conditions of lockdown or suggests ways of reconnecting thereafter. The work invites us to experience the present, while also referencing the role of a soothsayer who has clairvoyant abilities to predict the future. If the pandemic has provided a portal to imagine different ways of being and living in the future, Soothsayer Serenades demonstrates an artistic response to how we could re-imagine our shared, global community and reaffirms the importance of our interconnection to each other.
– Sharmila Wood (based in Perth, Australia)
At the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The Museum got a grant in preparation for hosting Notes for Tomorrow and with it they have been able to commission short essays from some of the folks invited to create a playlist for Soothsayer Serenades. https://issuu.com/unlvmuseum/docs/dinaemerson and https://issuu.com/unlvmuseum/docs/heelanaqshband_essay. They also created a Zine.
Many of the artworks in the exhibition address spirituality as a grounding mechanism, sharing ways to make sense of the world when so much is in doubt. Some engage with specific mythology, while others reveal political structures that may or may not still be standing. The formation of monuments is questioned, and their removal is all but certain. The exhibition addresses art’s potential in the construction of collective memory in a global era. We learn the importance of sustaining and sharing different forms of knowledge, prompting us to re-imagine our conceptions of the future.
Notes for Tomorrow is a traveling exhibition organized and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI) and initiated by Frances Wu Giarratano, Becky Nahom, Renaud Proch, and Monica Terrero. The exhibition was made possible with the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, VIA Art Fund, and ICI’s Board of Trustees and International Forum.
