River Conversations: Meditations and Music

Join us for a special afternoon of meditation and music. Begin with a walking meditation in the HRM Courtyard led by artist Bahar Behbahani, followed by a collective experience of her work, From Her Hair the River Flows, a 2024 video installation incorporating sight, sound, and poetry on view in Rivers Flow / Artists Connect. The program concludes with a performance at 3pm by Afro-Polka Ensemble in the exhibition galleries, featuring a repertoire that responds to the artwork and the Yonkers community. The Afro-Polka Ensemble is composed of Maciek Schejbal on drums, Jerome Harris on bass, Anders Nilsson on guitar, Jason Marshall on saxophone and flute, and Kaïssa Doumbè on vocals.

Iranian-born multidisciplinary artist Bahar Behbahani uses seven monitors, stereo sound, and graphite on a wooden shelf for her installation. The videos are about eight of the world’s contested bodies of water, from South Africa through the Americas and Asia to Palestine and capture the artist’s performative drawing, interacting lapis lazuli and ink.

These visual elements are accompanied by a musical landscape composed by Maciek Schejbal and performed by Afro-Polka Ensemble, as well as voice performances by theater artist Tara Ahmadinejad. The texts are sourced from the poetry of Etel Adnan, Dionne Brand, Anne Carson, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Anne Waldman. Afro-Polka Ensemble’s New York world music and jazz artist Maciek Schejbal is a percussionist with wide-ranging musical interests honed in his native Poland, UK, South Africa, and the US.

Support provided by Art Bridges.