It is 1969. American jazz trumpeter Don Cherry meets South African bassist Johnny Dyani in Sweden. Two years later, Cherry, Dyani, and Okay Temiz take the stage in Paris for a liveperformance that results in the album Blue Lake. Charged with the spirit of improvisation, Blue Lake plays like a raw meditation—urgent, unfiltered, alive.

Years later, the Johnny Dyani Quartet recordsSong for Bikoin Copenhagen. It is a rallying cryfor Steve Biko, the South African activist who was assassinated by the apartheid governmentin 1977. Cherry's trumpet threads through the piece, accompanying it with melodic, unboundemotional resonance.

In the wake of the 1960s Black Civil Rights movement, the wave of African independence, andthe rise of Pan-African solidarity, Cherry and Dyani are intertwined through sound. Their collaboration is one of many meetings of Black life.

Remnants begins here. What lingers in the archive? What breaths of Black life persist in itsfolds? What are the aural, visual, and tactile traces that hold both beauty and tension? Remnants pulls together a poetic constellation of gestures by living and departed artists, where pasts and presents meet in chorus.

Curated by Tawanda Appiah.