Visible Music

Music, video and conversation and the political, visual and aesthetics of 1990s and 2000s Hiphop and R&B.

This event has been organised in conjunction with Anneke Kampman’s exhibition An Endless Archive, on view at San Mei Gallery between 28 April – 10 June 2023.

In 1993 Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs founds the Bad Boy Entertainment label as an imprint of Sony Music and, in the years that follow, leads the mainstreaming of New York hip-hop and RnB in global popular culture. This moment marks changing coordinates of an aesthetics of light and a politics of economic monopoly. This discussion, drawing from the forthcoming book Monopolated Light and Power (87 Press), takes Bad Boy Entertainment as the starting point for a reflection that intersects financial capitalism and gentrification, the physics of light and the metaphysics of value, death and mourning, and millennial music and video aesthetics.