2025
Site-responsive Installation
Brewer Harris Projects, Syracuse
Curated by Miesha Shih & Laura Heyman
Transient follows the career of Bahauddin Alam, our parafictional jazz musician, on his music tour of the northeast US in the 1950s, and performances in Syracuse, New York. The installation is site responsive in its depiction of a 1950s bar in the once thriving Black community of the 15th ward, Syracuse, evoking performances Alam and similar musicians might have had there, before the neighbourhood was demolished to make room for highway I-80. The installation includes new paintings and concert posters, along with videos that narrate Alam’s immigration to the United States. Every element in the space is designed to reflect Alam’s Indian roots and adopted Blackness.
