Minor Music at the End of the World is a performance in three movements based on SAIDIYA HARTMAN's acclaimed essays The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance and Litany for Grieving Sisters.
FEATURING ANDRÉ HOLLAND, OKWUI OKPOKWASILI AND FILM BY ARTHUR JAFA
WITH ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTIONS BY PRECIOUS OKOYOMON AND CAMERON ROWLAND A.O.
COMMISSIONED AND PRESENTED BY HARTWIG ART FOUNDATION
After its critically acclaimed world premiere in Amsterdam in 2025, Minor Music will take the stage at the Goldoni Theatre in Venice during the opening week of the 2026 Venice Biennale. The stage adaptation is based on the writings of scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman, who takes W. E. B. Du Bois’s apocalyptic short story The Comet as a point of departure for her text.
How does one live at the end of the world? Is it possible to envision a world without racism? And what would be required to produce such a world?
Minor Music is presented in three movements:
Movement I: The End of White Supremacy — Featuring Andre Holland
Movement II: Dead River — Featuring Okwui Okpokwasili
Movement III: The World is Dead — A film by Arthur Jafa
The collaboratively developed stage performance explores the possibility of Black life at the end of the world and in the wake of racial capitalism and white supremacy. Against this complexly layered backdrop, Minor Music conveys an ongoing series of catastrophes that converge at this critical inflection point — among others, the arrival of Africans in New York City, the first slave auction in lower Manhattan, the precarity of Black life, global pandemics, and environmental catastrophes that make life seemingly unlivable. In doing so, it provokes a series of penetrating questions about Black life at the end of the world and the new social formations that arise in its wake.
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