Black Sound Art: Mendi+Keith Obadike

It's always a pleasure to be in conversation with Mendi and Keith Obadike. The sound art duo have been working together for 25 years, which gives them perspective to be able to identify trends, changes, and ongoing challenges in the field. Their sound work is beautifully designed, often utilizing the human voice as an instrument, and typically they take on issues often ignored in sound art, like race relations in the United States or the country's histories of exclusion. In this conversation, we covered a lot of ground, including their recent refusal to accept an award from ZKM, a media arts center in Germany, due to that organization's public disclosure of their difficulties in adjudicating within an offensive and false dichotomy of quality vs diversity.