On Saturday, 14 March 2026, Dead Symbols co-hosted BLACK STUDY at @chimurenga_sa Factory in collaboration with A Semblance and Operation Khataza @one.stab@ufarrah_khataza
As a study session, BLACK STUDY was conceived as a collective site of listening, reading, and discussion hosted by @dustybarryblancochucks - drawing on the long tradition of study as a political and artistic practice within Black radical thought, the gathering asks how music can function not only as aesthetic production, but as a method of inquiry, refusal, and world-ending. Thanks to all who attended and our selector @dylanmarviin for keeping us moving throughout the day
filmed by @nicholas.j.faure
edit by @jchitter
On Saturday, 14 March 2026, Dead Symbols will co-host BLACK STUDY at Chimurenga Factory in collaboration with A Semblance and Operation Khataza.
The study session is conceived as a collective site of listening, reading, and discussion. Drawing on the long tradition of study as a political and artistic practice within Black radical thought, the gathering asks how music can function not only as aesthetic production, but as a method of inquiry, refusal, and world-ending.
The event will begin with an informal discussion amongst participating artists prior to live performances; and forms part of Dead Symbols’ ongoing international project development and public programming that foregrounds experimentation, pedagogy, and dialogue.
Event Details
Date: Saturday, 14 March 2026
Time: 4pm
Venue: Chimurenga Factory, Cape Town
Admission: Free
This event is supported by the National Arts Council South Africa.
We will be touring our new album Ubuhle Bub’hlungu throughout the Netherlands during November! Special guests to be announced over the next few weeks. Design by @davidkarwan #DS
Ubuhle bub’ hlungu is DEAD SYMBOLS’ fourth full-length project. The 12 track album solidifies this Cape Town based trio as one of the foremost forward-looking ensembles working in our crisis laden contemporary times. This work, like all of their projects to date, is grounded in a radical blending of a collective ethic of improvisation and the technical precision of electronic music. Their sonic explorations have always been matched only by their theoretical and political concerns.
There is a sense of urgency in this project. Political poetics are wrapped in lush, spectral melodies and driving, contemplative rhythms. The title of the album, loosely translated as ‘the pain and/or costs of attaining beauty’, alerts us to the stakes at hand; the material conditions of artistic production and the political stakes of our modern regime of aesthetics, i.e. the price paid (and continues to be paid) by those the Martinique revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) characterized as the wretched, whose flesh and blood founded and sustains our modern order and its systems of representation.
In Ubuhle bub’ hlungu, DS takes us through a myriad of sites and references; from Khayelitsha to Khartoum, from John Coltrane (1926-1967) to Brenda Fassie (1964-2004), Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) to Yvonne Vera (1964-2005), from the Bulhoek massacre (1921) to the Marikana massacre (2012), we are pulled into a whirling world of literature, poetry and politics, theory and African cinema: it is an intergenerational and intramural dialogue that cuts across space and time to consider the contributions of a wide range of indispensable figures such as Sylvia Wynter (b. 1928), Safi Faye (1943-2023), Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020), Chiwoniso Maraire (1976-2013). The critique is as unflinching as the sound’s uncompromising and haunting sharpness. What does critique sound like?
We’re honored to be performing at Le Guess Who? @le_guess_who 2025 on 7 & 8 November as part of @one.stab curated program. Gratitude to Asher / @le_guess_who for the invitation. See you soon 🇿🇦🇳🇱 #DS
WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to present Mirage Blue, a collaborative video installation by Wendy Fredriksson & Rowan Smith.
Opening 5 April 10am- 1pm @whatiftheworld
The titular film was written and directed by Fredriksson, incorporating artworks from Smith’s 2023 exhibition ‘A Deixis in Folds’. In addition, Smith scores the work under the guise of Memoriez.
Featuring Yun Lee and Nazeer Jappie, Mirage Blue centres on two individuals engaged in a curious boardgame. The board resembles an MC Escher take on Snakes and Ladders, as the two participants take turns rolling a die and moving their pieces along intertwined blue symbols taken from Smith’s work. The game initially takes place at a glass table in a tidy, liminal non-space, but this is increasingly disrupted as each move shifts the participants between further evocative realms and back again. There seems to be a continuous temporal folding, a permeable membrane through which leakages occur, as elements from these parallel realms progressively occupy the sleek surface of the table.
The end goal is ambiguous, and whether the game has a victor is not apparent. What is clear is that the game is not without stakes, a thick tension hangs over the table as the players await the consequences of their opponent’s next move. In a broad sense it seems to speak to the complexity of unfurling intimate relationships and the tensions between what is revealed and concealed during the process of attempting to excavate the other.
The symbolic realms of Mirage Blue exhibit a number of Baroque sensibilities: the haptic visuality of water and cloth stuck to skin, melted wax and candlelight chiaroscuro, a dinner scene which channels the palpable tactility of a Baroque still life. In Gilles Deleuze’s 1988 book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, the philosopher argues that the dynamic messiness of the Baroque exemplifies how seemingly opposing elements continuously shape one another and are interconnected. This idea of the Fold becomes a lens through which to read both the film’s visually-striking conclusion and the integrated sculptures from Smith, both of which are progressively immersed in the onset of blue.
By Tim Liebbrandt
WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to present Mirage Blue, a collaborative video installation by Wendy Fredriksson & Rowan Smith.
Opening 5 April 10am- 1pm @whatiftheworld
The titular film was written and directed by Fredriksson, incorporating artworks from Smith’s 2023 exhibition ‘A Deixis in Folds’. In addition, Smith scores the work under the guise of Memoriez.
Featuring Yun Lee and Nazeer Jappie, Mirage Blue centres on two individuals engaged in a curious boardgame. The board resembles an MC Escher take on Snakes and Ladders, as the two participants take turns rolling a die and moving their pieces along intertwined blue symbols taken from Smith’s work. The game initially takes place at a glass table in a tidy, liminal non-space, but this is increasingly disrupted as each move shifts the participants between further evocative realms and back again. There seems to be a continuous temporal folding, a permeable membrane through which leakages occur, as elements from these parallel realms progressively occupy the sleek surface of the table.
The end goal is ambiguous, and whether the game has a victor is not apparent. What is clear is that the game is not without stakes, a thick tension hangs over the table as the players await the consequences of their opponent’s next move. In a broad sense it seems to speak to the complexity of unfurling intimate relationships and the tensions between what is revealed and concealed during the process of attempting to excavate the other.
The symbolic realms of Mirage Blue exhibit a number of Baroque sensibilities: the haptic visuality of water and cloth stuck to skin, melted wax and candlelight chiaroscuro, a dinner scene which channels the palpable tactility of a Baroque still life. In Gilles Deleuze’s 1988 book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, the philosopher argues that the dynamic messiness of the Baroque exemplifies how seemingly opposing elements continuously shape one another and are interconnected. This idea of the Fold becomes a lens through which to read both the film’s visually-striking conclusion and the integrated sculptures from Smith, both of which are progressively immersed in the onset of blue.
By Tim Liebbrandt
