Information and resources on 'Level 2 Gallery: Illuminations' at Tate Online.
Sanford Biggers, Hip Hop Ni Sasagu (In Fond Memory of Hip Hop), 2004
Single screen projection, colour video on DVD
Running time: 10 minutes 13 seconds
© Sanford Biggers 2007.
Courtesy Kenny Schachter ROVE, London
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14 December 2007
–
24 February 2008
Sanford Biggers
(born 1970, USA)
Sanford Biggers was born in Los Angeles in 1970. He studied
at Morehouse College, Atlanta and subsequently at the School of the Art Institute,
Chicago where he gained a Masters in Fine Art. During the early 1990s he travelled
to Japan, an experience which was to have a lasting impact on his practice.
With an interest in performance and participation, he uses a variety of media
in his work. A solo exhibition of his video work was held at the Contemporary
Arts Center, Cincinnati in 2004. Biggers’ recent multimedia project, THE
SOMETHIN' SUITE, was commissioned by PERFORMA 07 and premiered
at the Second Visual Art Performance Biennale in New York in autumn 2007.
Since the 1990s Biggers has been fascinated by the correspondences between
different spiritual and cultural systems. The principles of universality and
community he has found in both African-American and Buddhist traditions has
been a particular influence on both his film and object-based practice. Made
on location in Japan, Hip Hop Ni Sasagu (In Fond Memory of Hip Hop) examines
the objects used by individuals to express particular codes of belief. The
video documents an improvised bell-ringing ensemble performed by the artist
and fifteen others at the Joanin Zen temple in Ibaraki. A number of the ‘singing
bells’ used in the video were fabricated from melted-down jewellery associated
with hip hop that the artist found in Japan. Biggers has noted that hip hop
is both ‘everything and nothing’. This ambivalence
may be reflected in his use of a bell choir and Buddhist meditation to memorialise
hip hop.