wasteLAnd presents music driven by collective action and creation, both in the act of composition and in community-based realization. The program features world premieres by Richard Barrett and Nicholas Deyoe in addition to radical works by Raven Chacon, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Sarah Reid, and Wilfrido Terrazas. These works explore degrees of improvisation, highlighting the necessity of communal action and negotiation in these collective creations while also reflecting on grassroots political collectivism. 

Nueva Canción: Songs of Protest and Resistance is a new, music-based multimedia event created by Sandra Powers and Timur, and performed by the glam rock band Timur and the Dime Museum. Produced by Beth Morrison Projects, the concert is rooted in the Latin American song movement that began in the 1960s and criticized political oppression and spurred sociopolitical change. These songs told multilayered stories about unequal distribution of wealth, corrupt politics, and abuses of power, evolving from folk to incorporate electronic, classical, and rock influences. Nueva Canción focuses on the songbook of Mercedes Sosa, the driving force behind the movement. In addition, Timur’s memories of being raised under communism and then witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union will provide a personal perspective on the complexity of political regimes. 

Dog Star Orchestra is an ensemble and a once-a-year festival of experimental music, started in 2005 by composer Michael Pisaro as a way of playing recent experimental music by young composers and classic pieces from the experimental tradition. Described as “messily exceptional” by the Los Angeles Times, Dog Star events happen throughout the Los Angeles area and often feature offbeat performances in out-of-the-way places, alongside more traditional concert settings. Dog Star Orchestra is one of the main presenters fostering and documenting the strong local experimental music scene, as well as presenting work that would otherwise not be heard in the U.S.

Globalization is all about the free flow of people, goods, capital, and ideas, but more than ever states are encapsulating themselves, closing their borders and hesitant to recognize immigrants as part of the nation. Why are border crossings, both physically and culturally, conceived as a threat? What motivates the current worldwide tendency toward exclusion? In Search of Our Times is a six panel discussions presented as part of Wende Conversations: A Discussion Series Supported by Susan Horowitz and Rick Feldman.

The series of (mostly) peaceful revolutions that took down the Berlin Wall effectively ended state socialism in Eastern Europe, and brought not just a political but also a material transformation. Countless people who lived through socialism discarded the household and consumer items they had lived with and loved or hated for many years, as they finally had access to higher-standard goods. This exhibition presents the metamorphosis of household and consumer goods from objects of everyday life to items in a museum collection, by way of flea markets, and invites contemporary artists to position them in the here and now.

In the fall of 1981, Bill Aron, the “Dean” of American Jewish photographers, visited the cities of Leningrad, Minsk, and Moscow. In each city, Aron photographed the local synagogue – which served as the common ground for Soviet Jews who were trying to hold on to, or regain, their religious heritage – as well as Jews who wished to leave the country, the so-called refuseniks. He also made striking portraits of the Soviet Jewish population at home and in public life. Aron’s photos will be paired with artist Yevgeniy’s Fiks’s images and artifacts from Birobidzhan, the Jewish autonomous region in the Soviet Union near the border with China.