Katarina Zdjelar
My Lifetime (Malaika)
Single channel HD, video 5’37, 2012
Courtesy: artist
My Lifetime (Malaika) (2012) features Ghana’s National Symphony Orchestra recorded in the National Theatre in Accra. The musicians play “Malaika”, originally a cheerful and empowering postcolonial composition that was famously performed by musical celebrities like Miriam Makeba, Harry Belafonte, Boney M. and many others. The orchestra was funded in the late 1950s when Ghana, under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, had become independent from the United Kingdom. Nkrumah’s government introduced new cultural structures in order to establish and enforce national consciousness and accomplish the shift from colonial rule to independence.
In his text “Sounding the Social”, David Markus writes also about this work: “The musical performances staged in the video work of Katarina Zdjelar frequently allegorize broad social or political realities. In a piece titled My Lifetime (Malaika), 2012, we observe rag-tag members of Ghana’s National Symphony Orchestra rehearsing ‘Malaika’ (…).Throughout the work, Zdjelar’s camera remains concentrated on the scored sound boards and corroded brass instruments of a clearly underfinanced ensemble as well as on the languid gestures of the players, which bespeak a general fatigue precipitated by their ordinary lives as day laborers. This atmosphere of weariness is reflected in the music itself, which ambles along, not quite on tempo, not quite in key. Introduced into Ghana by the British, European orchestral music sits uneasily within the country’s rich musical traditions. Bearing the burden both of national pride and colonial heritage, the performers in Zdjelar’s video—one of whom nods off in his seat at the video’s conclusion—are arbiters of a hybrid cultural form whose vitality in its present context appears to have been exhausted.”
Excerpted from: David Markus, “Sounding the Social”, Art in America, September 2013, pp. 111, 113.
