As part of his exhibition Who Is Queen? at MoMA in 2021, the artist Adam Pendleton convened a podcast featuring a series of recorded conversations between pairs of notable writers and musicians. Via his own DABA Press, he published a series of elegant thin hard-cover books, where edited transcriptions of the MoMA podcast were intertwined with archival photographs and additional writings. DABA’s core interest, he would say, was the relationships between conceptual practices, Blackness, and historical avant-gardes.

Volume 5 is a conversation between two musicians: Matana Roberts and Tyshawn Sorey.

For this event, Adam picks up where that conversation left off and expands on how two people might be able to talk to each other—by exchanging words, yes, but also by sharing sounds and by performing music together.

Adam asks Matana and Tyshawn about what it could mean to pluralize the concept of the “avant-garde” and imagine many types of avant-gardes. About how abstraction can be not just a model for resistance but a mechanism for imagining alternative realities and futures. About experimentation as survival.

After the discussion, Matana and Tyshawn perform a live improvised set, with Matana on saxophone and Tyshawn on drums.

This event is made possible with the friendly support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.