Pebofatso Mokoena, Earth to Moten, 2020, acrylic on canvas, Courtesy of the artist

Accompanying Stan Douglas: Allegories of the Present at Griffin Art Projects, ReMIX History is a public program series including film screenings, conversations with curators and panels with artists and musicians.

Griffin Art Projects’ Adjunct Curator, Dr. Karen Tam, and The Polygon Gallery’s TD Curatorial Fellow, Oluwasayo Olowo-Ake, will co-host an engaging panel discussion with artists and musicians Pebofatso Mokoena (Johannesburg), Mark V. Campbell (Toronto), and Satch Hoyt (Berlin) to explore migration, sound and place. The conversation will delve into acoustic mappings of history, the land and waters, sonic architecture, and the impact that migrations have had on the creation of diasporic and border-crossing sounds and music.

Born 1993, Ekurhuleni, South Africa  | Lives and works, Johannesburg, South Africa 

Pebofatso completed his NDip (Visual Art) at the University of Johannesburg and  his BA (Visual Art) at Wits with distinction. He is a lecturer in Drawing and  Interdisciplinary Presentation at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at UJ. 

Mokoena has had 4 solo presentations of his work - The Pebofatso Experience,  Inside Jobs, Internal Probes, and Neoclassical Taste Matrix currently on show at  First Floor Gallery Harare. Group shows include Diptych; Disclosure, Fresh Produce,  Songs of Sankofa, Inner Nature, Fortunes Remixed and South African Voices: A New  Generation of Printmakers. In 2020, Mokoena received a merit award for the Wits  Young Artist Award.

Emerging from early practice in drawing and printmaking, Mokoena’s painting  practice is formally underscored by precise mark-making and division of space,  thinking with ideas around micro and macro maps of politics, visual art, architecture  and the environment, which is, in theory, getting smaller and smaller.

Mokoena’s work is currently rooted in the relations between micro and macro maps  of meaning across multiple environments. Thinking through interdisciplinary modes  such as architecture, layering practices, decoloniality, mind-mapping and aesthetics,  Pebofatso uses his own personal narratives and a consistent application of experimental enquiry as tools to make sense of, and potentially build parallel  cosmologies, set across a world that (in theory) is becoming smaller and smaller. 

Mark V. Campbell is a DJ, scholar and curator. His research explores the relationships between Afrosonic innovations and notions of the human. Dr. Campbell is currently the Principal Investigator in the SSHRC funded research project, Hip Hop Archives: The Poetics and Potentials of Knowledge Production. His recent books include the monograph AfroSonic Life (2022), the co-edited collection of essays, We Still Here: Hip Hop in North of the 49th Parallel published (in 2020) and his forthcoming co-edited collection Hip Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production with Murray Forman is due out in 2023. Mark is Assistant Professor of Music and Culture at the University of Toronto Scarborough and holds Research Fellow positions with the Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence and the Research Centre for Music, Sound and Society in Canada.

Satch Hoyt is a spiritualist, a believer in ritual and retention. A visual artist and a musician, his diverse and multifaceted body of work - whether sculpture, sound installation, painting, musical performance, or musical recording - is united in its investigation of the “Eternal Afro-Sonic Signifier” and its movement across and amid the cultures, peoples, places, and times of the African Diaspora. Those four evocative words (a term coined by Hoyt) refer to the “mnemonic network of sound” that was enslaved Africans’ “sole companion during the forced migration of the Middle Passage.”1

lt was, and is, a hard-won somatic tool kit for remembering where you come from and who you are - and maybe, where you’re going - against all the many odds. Of Jamaican-British descent, Hoyt was born in London and currently lives in Berlin. Having also spent time in New York, Paris, Mombasa, and Australia’s Northern Territory - all points on the many-sided and ever-expanding star that is the African Diaspora - he is an intimate observer of the sites of convergence where the Diaspora comes together to sing, shout, and be, reflecting itself to itself. Employing the shared tool kit to connect, express, and commiserate across centuries and oceans, Hoyt taps into aural and oral echoes as well as into those retained in the historical and material record. - written by Rujeko Hockley for the catalog Prospect 4:The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, 2017.

Karen Tam is a Tiohtià:ke/Montréal-based artist whose research focuses on the constructions and imaginations of ‘ethnic’ spaces through installations in which she recreates Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, opium dens, curio shops and other sites of cultural encounters. She has exhibited her work and participated in residencies in North America, Europe, and China, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the He Xiangning Art Museum. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths (University of London) and a MFA in Sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau

Oluwasayo Taiwo Olowo-Ake is a curator, singer, songwriter, and artist, from Nigeria. She obtained her Master of Arts in Art History (Critical Curatorial Studies) from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Oluwasayo is the curator of 'Oruko mi ni: Reinterpreting Ìbejì', of which the second phase, 'Oruko mi: Taiyewo and Kehinde', was part of the Museum of Anthropology’s 'Sankofa: African Routes: Canadian Roots' exhibition. Oluwasayo is currently the TD Curatorial Fellow at The Polygon Gallery.