The street against Babylon: Urban avant-garde resistance

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Jane Dickson, Artist, New York FUTURA 2000, Artist, New York James Massiah, Musician, Poet and DJ, London Moderator: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine 
Hip-hop, graffiti, and dub poetry are artistic strategies born in part as a reaction to oppression and racism in Western megalopolises such as New York City in the 1970s. As tools of resistance and a means of artistic emancipation for people of color and the disenfranchised, this repertoire of actions in urban terrain stands in opposition to Babylon, the metaphorical repository of former colonial or coercive power erected as an asphalt fortress, which is thus haunted by its past. This discussion looks at the history of forms that, from clubs to city walls, have transformed the metropolis into a theater of poetic actions. 
With the support of the agnès b. endowment fund.
Jane Dickson, an early Colab member, was a key figure in the 1980s downtown New York City art and hip-hop scenes. Today, she is an internationally recognized artist with work in the permanent collections of 40 museums. Her work is currently on view in 'Are We There Yet?', a solo exhibition at Karma, Los Angeles (until November 9, 2024) as well as in group shows at The Drawing Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Stems Gallery, Paris. 


FUTURA 2000 (born Leonard Hilton McGurr) is an abstract artist whose multidimensional oeuvre – expressed across painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and graphic design – is as venerated for its kinetic power as it is for its sheer inventiveness. As a pioneering force when graffiti intersected with the formal gallery ecosystem, he was the first to introduce abstraction to what was then an almost entirely letter-based genre. Exhibitions of his early work include presentations at Patti Astor's Fun Gallery, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, and MoMA PS1’s landmark 1981 ‘New York/New Wave’ exhibition, where he exhibited alongside his contemporaries, and friends, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, Lee Quiñones, and Rammellzee. Exhibitions of FUTURA’s work have been staged in museums including the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Groninger Museum, Groningen; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 
James Massiah is a poet and musician from London. His ongoing series ‘New Poems’ is released in volumes and details his day-to-day experiences of life, love, and labor in London. Massiah’s latest EP, True Romance, further emphasizes his status as a central figure in London’s creative community. He has been commissioned to produce work for the BBC and The Guardian and has featured in campaigns for Dior, Nike, and Lotus, and has been profiled in Vogue, Dazed, i-D, and GQ. 
Hans Ulrich Obrist is the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, and the senior advisor at LUMA Arles. Prior to this, he was the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show ‘World Soup (The Kitchen Show)’ in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Obrist’s publications include Ways of Curating (2015); The Age of Earthquakes (2015); Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015); The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021); 140 Ideas for Planet Earth (2021); Edouard Glissant: Archipelago(2021),James Lovelock: Ever Gaia (2023); Remember to Dream (2023); and Une vie in progress&nbsp;(2023).

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