Transmissions is a group exhibition that broadcasts connections across generations through photography, sound, video, painting, installation, and performance. This exhibition departs from Black Archives Sweden’s Family Archive collection, which is dedicated to sustaining diasporic life through experimentation, care, and communal activation. The exhibition is curated by Tawanda Appiah och Ulrika Flink.
The exhibition showcases Traore Dahlberg's partially interactive work, Cassettes (2019). The work is made up of cassette tapes from the production company Seydoni, founded by the artist's father in 1998 in Burkina Faso. At the same time, he also started the country’s first cassette factory, which during its first two years produced an average of 20,000 cassettes a day from 350 different artists with over 1.6 million albums sold.
By creating a national platform for production and distribution, the predominant production patterns were broken when music had previously been recorded in other countries and then imported. Seydoni established an infrastructure for the entire production chain by starting business associations, arranging competitions and concerts, and training music producers, sound engineers, editors and industrial technicians. As technology progressed, the cassette tape soon became outdated and the production closed in 2005.
In Cassettes, Dahlberg has unpacked the tapes, unpacked what is today a very important part of the cultural history of Burkina Faso. A proof of a time when the music industry was booming, and of a vision to try to change set structures and create a platform for artistry and expression that has later come to play an important part of the society and self-identity. It points to how industrial changes and transitions can render something so highly valued useless overnight.
For more information about Transmissions, please visit Skånes Konstförening's website.
