ARI BENJAMIN MEYERS

is an artist who lives and works in Berlin. Trained as a composer and conductor at The Juilliard School, New York City (NY); Yale University, New Haven (CT), and The Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (MD), Meyers became widely known in the context of the visual and performative arts in 2007 as musical director and conductor of the group exhibition Il Tempo del Postino (Manchester International Festival in 2007, and Art Basel in 2009). Since then, Meyers’s works have been shown internationally in institutions and festivals including Berliner Festspiele; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Festival d’Avignon; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; MAAT, Lisbon; Beaufort Triennial; V–A–C Foundation, Moscow; OGR, Turin; Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara; Frac Franche-Comté, Besançon; Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana, Venice; Liverpool Biennial; Nowy Teatr, Warsaw; Public Art Munich; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Sonic Somatic Festival, Florence; Biennale de Lyon; and Lenbachhaus, Munich. His performances Unless and Forecast (LX23) are currently touring throughout Europe.

The work is centered around Marshall Allen, renowned free and avant-garde jazz musician and current leader of the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra, of which he has been a continual member since 1958. For this film, the artist composed two original scores for Allen to interpret, inviting him to engage, through music, in an intimate conversation about the spontaneity of music-making, the rigor of rehearsals, and the potentiality of collaboration. The camera portrays Allen privately practicing a seemingly nostalgic melody in his Philadelphia residence, the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra, which has been at once the band’s home, its rehearsal hall, and the frontier of musical exploration, for over five decades. On the brink of his one hundredth birthday, he interprets the composition on the alto saxophone, and turns the occasional memory lapse into prompts for improvisation, exposing both his frail age and his brilliant virtuosity. Meanwhile, we wander through the house that, like a dense palimpsest, manifests the rich history and eclectic activities of the Sun Ra Arkestra through futuristic props and images of ancient cosmologies. Merging the documentary with the speculative genre, the film then teleports Allen onto a stage, and we witness him playing an evocative composition with his Electronic Valve Instrument (EVI) against the dome of Philadelphia’s historic Fels Planetarium. There, spectacular nebulas and symbols of his life—from the patch representing the racially segregated US Army regiment he served, to the landmark mosaic dedicated to the Sun Ra Arkestra in the city’s Vernon Park—come one after the other before he disappears into the darkness and becomes a constellation. Telling a musical and visual story of transformation from the earthly to the otherworldly, the work transcends temporalities and places and pays homage both to Allen’s century-long life lived through music and to Sun Ra’s revolutionary musical vision and political utopia, which discerned in the unknown of sonic experimentation and the vastness of the universe the possibility of a transformed present and a radically different future.