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Gagosian Premieres

Session 8
Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Jason Moran
All of No Man’s Land Is Ours

In this Session, pianist and composer Jason Moran performs a contemporary jazz reinterpretation of the 1919 song “All of No Man’s Land Is Ours” inside Ellen Gallagher’s solo exhibition of the same title at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Composed by jazz pioneer James Reese Europe, who founded the regimental band the Harlem Hellfighters, with lyrics by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, the song recounts a soldier’s call home to his sweetheart. The track is from Moran’s latest album, From the Dancehall to the Battlefield, in which he meditates on Europe’s life, music, and legacy, incorporating new sounds and strategies, such as “real-time remixing,” as he revisits the influential originals.

Likewise remixing processes of accretion, erasure, and extraction in her multilayered compositions, in the exhibition Gallagher juxtaposes six of her works with Paul Cezanne’s Scipio (1867), the Post-Impressionist painter’s only image of a Black subject. Combining oil paint, cut and carved rubber, crumpled notebook papers, and metal with imagery that delves into the depths of both history and the ocean, her paintings chart the liminal and mutable spaces of “no man’s land.”

Sessions

Sessions is a spin-off of Gagosian Premieres featuring short-form videos of performances with music, dance, and poetry by some of today’s most acclaimed creative voices. Sessions can be newly commissioned performances or outtakes from Premieres episodes.

aja monet performing in Amoako Boafo: what could possibly go wrong, if we tell it like it is at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York

Session 7
Wednesday, July 12, 2023

aja monet
window seat

In this Session, blues poet, musician, and organizer aja monet performs with Weedie Braimah, Jeremiah Edwards, Craig Harris, Jehbreal Jackson, and Samora Pinderhughes inside the exhibition Amoako Boafo: what could possibly go wrong, if we tell it like it is at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York. In a powerful exchange of spoken word and song, monet reads poetry that she composed in response to Boafo’s portraits, which blend themes of Black love, resistance, joy, and community building, while her musical collaborators perform a free-flowing new interpretation of Aaron Neville’s 1966 soul hit “Tell It Like It Is” on piano, bass, drums, trombone, didgeridoo, and djembe, with expressive vocals by Jackson. Pinderhughes and Braimah also worked with monet on her recently released debut album, When the Poems Do What They Do (2023), which was described by NPR’s Sheldon Pearce as “gorgeously meditative and potently groovy.”
Isabella Summers performing in an exhibition of work by Cy Twombly at Gagosian, Beverly Hills

Session 6
Saturday, March 4, 2023

Isabella Summers
To Neptune, Ruler of the Seas Profound

As part of Sessions, a spin-off of Gagosian Premieres, musician, producer, and film and television composer Isabella Summers, a founding member of Florence and the Machine, performs inside the exhibition Cy Twombly at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. Summers presents three chapters from a piece she composed, titled To Neptune, Ruler of the Seas Profound, that is inspired by Twombly’s life and work. The music is interwoven with quotations from poems and literary texts by authors who have served as muses or subjects for Twombly, including Homer, Stéphane Mallarmé, and William Butler Yeats.

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