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Carl Craig Sessions Launch Event with Carl Craig, DeForrest Brown Jr., and Kelly Kivland

June 25, 2020, 5 pm, Dia Online

Event Details
Thursday, June 25, 2020, 5 pm
Live on Zoom

This launch event for the Carl Craig Sessions offers a live conversation between renowned techno DJ and producer Carl Craig, sound theorist DeForrest Brown, Jr., and Dia curator Kelly Kivland. The conversation will investigate the history and significance of techno and introduces the first session of film screenings, presenting Tony Cokes’s Black Celebration (1988), Otolith Group’s Hydra Decapita (2010), and Techno City: What is Detroit Techno? (2000). The three films are available to view here from Thursday, June 25, 12 pm (EST), to Sunday, June 28, 9 pm (EST).

RSVP and receive a Zoom link here. 

DeForrest Brown, Jr. was born in 1990 in Tampa Bay, Florida, and lives is a New York City. He is music writer, media theorist, and curator. He produces digital audio and extended media under the moniker Speaker Music and is a representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. His work is concerned with speculative futures in performance, music’s intersections with technology and algorithms, and pushing electronic music into ever-more radical, multimedia presentations. Brown’s forthcoming book, Assembling a Black Counter Culture, a history of techno and electronic music that focuses on Black experiences in industrialized labor systems, is set to be released by Primary Information in the fall of this year.

Carl Craig was born in Detroit in 1969. He began his career in the late 1980s as a DJ and producer, and soon came to prominence within the Detroit techno scene. Craig is frequently acknowledged as one of the field’s most wide-ranging artists, integrating inspirations and sounds from a variety of musical genres into his work. He has released several recordings on both his own Planet E Communications record label and under a number of aliases employed to explore new directions. Craig’s notable recent projects include Sessions (2008), a two-disc mix reimagining and celebrating over fifteen years of his musical catalogue. The artist’s interest in collaboration is evidenced in Versus, which was released in 2017. For the album, he worked with pianist Francesco Tristano, French orchestra Les Siècles, conductor François-Xavier Roth, and instrumentalist Moritz von Oswald. Most recently, Craig collaborated with Chineke! Orchestra to perform title track “Versus” alongside seminal tracks such as “At Les,” “The Melody,” and “Sandstorms” at the historic Royal Albert Hall in London.

Kelly Kivland is curator at Dia Art Foundation, where she has organized exhibitions and projects by artists including Carl Craig (2020); Nancy Holt (2018–19); Joëlle Tuerlinckx (2018); François Chaignaud and Cecilia Bengolea (2017); Isabel Lewis (2016); and Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi (2015), among others. Previously, as assistant curator at Dia, she helped organize Thomas Hirschhorn’s 2013 Gramsci Monument in New York City, Jean-Luc Moulène (2011) at Dia Beacon, and the Yvonne Rainer retrospective (2011–12) also at Dia Beacon. She also currently curates the ongoing Artists on Artists Lecture Series amongst other programs. She holds a master’s degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

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