Ekene Ijeoma's Deconstructed Anthems: Massachusetts

Artist Ekene Ijeoma presents the Boston premiere of his deeply moving installation and performance Deconstructed Anthems: Massachusetts in the historic Cyclorama at Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) daily from Tuesday, February 13 through Saturday, February 17, 2024, with a series of free, special performances by different musicians each evening from 7–8pm. Deconstructed Anthems, is a series of site-specific compositions, instruments, performances, and installations that portray mass incarceration in the U.S. using data from the U.S. Department of Justice and other sources. Ijeoma programmed an algorithmic composition that sonifies the over 1.5 million (disproportionately Black) people who were removed from their communities from 1925 to today by repeating the Star-Spangled Banner while removing notes at the increasing national incarceration rates and regional racial disparities.

Deconstructed Anthems: Massachusetts will be presented as a solo exhibition in the Cyclorama at Boston Center for the Arts. The installation features a custom piano retrofitted with hardware and software programmed to hold down keys at the same rates in the composition as a pianist is playing it. The piano will be performed by a number of musicians over the course of the exhibition. The installation also includes hundreds of drawings of hundreds of iterations of the composition generated from Ijeoma’s custom software.