Artist Talk with Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Join us as we welcome Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, a New York-Based artist, composer, and performer, for a reading from a soon-to-be published text, breaking down the performance and talk about his practice working with state affects and materials. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session facilitated by Professor Fred Moten.
“Y’all Don’t Wanna Hear Me (You Just Wanna Dance)” is a performance in which a long-range acoustic device (LRAD)* is used against its intended purpose of crowd dispersal, alternatively presenting it as a technology that might unite and even guide a crowd through sonic affect. Over the course of the device’s battery life, Toussaint-Baptiste plays music through the device, using its built-in microphone to speak with willing attendees and talk about his artistic practice, recite facts about the device’s history, and otherwise find ways to misuse the technology in an effort to reclaim something that has been funded by the public but used against the populace, and instead use it to bring public joy and conversation.
* Often referred to as “sound cannons,” long-range acoustic devices have been deployed by police forces across North America as a “non-lethal” sonic weapon against civilian populations engaged in protest as far back as 2004.
BIO:
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste is a New York-Based artist, composer, and performer considering notions of errant relations which thrive across subjectivities. Toussaint-Baptiste was a 2017 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room and received a Bessie Award in 2018 for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design. He has presented visual and performance work at MoMA PS1; Performance Space New York; The Brooklyn Museum; The Kitchen; Issue Project Room; The Studio Museum in Harlem; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; FringeArts, Philadelphia; Tanz Im August at Hau3, Berlin; Stoa Cultural Center, Helsinki among others. Toussaint-Baptiste is a founding member of the performance collective Wildcat!, and frequently collaborates with performers and visual artists including Will Rawls, Yanira Castro/a canary torsi, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and André M. Zachery. Toussaint-Baptiste lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and holds an MFA from Brooklyn College’s Performance and Interactive Media Arts program.