Performance: "Lullaby from the bottom of a ship"
About this Event
Tsedaye Makonnen's Astral Sea is a multidimensional body of work that synthesizes sacred East African and Byzantine visual traditions with contemporary narratives of Black feminism, liberation, and healing. Makonen revisits her textile, performance and soft sculpture series, created from the negative spaces of the sacred form of Ethiopian and Eritrean mäsqäl crosses and its connections to other Black/African spiritualities. Makonen activates these works as living icons of ancestral presence, protest, and protection in conversation with her exhibition on view at the National Museum of African Art, Sanctuary :: መቅደስ :: Mekdes. In collaboration with Makonen, water and Spirit, performer Jasmine Hearn animates the textiles while musician Alsarah creates the soundscape. They will transform the museum into a living liturgy of remembrance, astral projection and collective healing. Together, they generate a ritual and sonic encounter rooted in diasporic memory and spiritual cosmology that resists the colonial decontextualization of African sacred art, restoring these symbols to their original functions as tools of communal protection and transcendence. This iteration of their ongoing collaboration is titled Lullaby from the bottom of a ship, taken from a track that Alsarah developed for their last collaboration at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2024.
This performance is standing room as the audience is encouraged to move with the artists. Accessibility seating will be provided.
Singer, songwriter, bandleader, and ethnomusicologist Alsarah was born in Khartoum, Sudan and relocated to Yemen with her family before abruptly moving to the U.S. She has resided in Brooklyn, New York since 2004. Described by PBS American Masters as a "sonic historian," Alsarah was the subject of the documentary short Alsarah: The Sonic Historian, part of the In The Making series produced by American Masters and Firelight Media, which premiered in March 2026. The film documented her work with displaced Sudanese communities in Kampala and her role in sustaining cultural memory and collective grief through music amid an ongoing war. She has toured both nationally and internationally, and with Alsarah & the Nubatones has released three full-length albums. She has released an album with French electronic producer Débruit and was featured on the Nile Project‘s debut. In between albums, Alsarah worked with the Sudanese artist collective Refugee Club Productions on a variety of projects including the documentary Beats of the Antonov.
Jasmine Hearn, born and raised in Houston, is an interdisciplinary artist, teacher, doula, performer, and organizer. They recently completed the performance Memory Fleet: Beloved, Let’s Cross, co-presented by New York Live Arts and Chocolate Factory Theater. Named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2025, Hearn has received many awards, fellowships, and residencies. Hearn has collaborated with many artists and companies, including Bill T. Jones, Saul Williams, Solange Knowles, Tsedaye Makonnen, Holly Bass, Urban Bush Women, Dance Alloy Theater, and more, performaning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, BAM, the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Center, the 2019 Venice Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and more. Jasmine gives gratitude to Spirit, their mother and aunties, and all the mothering Black people who have supported their moving, remembering body.
Tsedaye Makonnen is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, a mother, and a former birthworker. Her light sculptures, textiles, and performance art function as a contemporary reflection of Byzantine and Medieval art, particularly through her engagement with spiritual symbolism and technologies, sacred aesthetics, and embodied ritual practices. Makonnen reclaims, reinterprets, and reactivates visual and spiritual lineages historically sidelined by Western art canons. Her recent achievements include an installation of several works from sculpture to textiles acquired by The Nelson-Atkins Museum in 2026, as well as exhibiting and performing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s "Africa and Byzantium" exhibition in 2023-2024, where she was one of two living artists commissioned for new works. Her light sculptures were acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in 2021 and are currently on view in Sanctuary :: መቅደስ :: Mekdes. An Astral Sea textile is a part of Studio Museum’s permanent collection. Sacred :: የተቀደሰ :: Yetekedse is on view in The Walters Art Museum. She has performed at the Venice Biennale including Spring 2026. She was a Clark Art Institute Fellow, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, and co-curated the traveling exhibit Ethiopia at the Crossroads, which won the Apollo Awards for Exhibition of the Year. In 2024 she archived oral histories of Ethiopian communities in D.C. with support from the Library of Congress, and is now working with a collective from the diaspora to expand the archive with support from the Mellon Foundation. Makonen was engaged in a multi-year collaboration as a visiting artist with Williams College Museum of Art, Williams ‘62 Center of Theater & Dance, and The Clark that resulted in a large-scale cross-institutional land activation across the Berkshires. Her roster includes EFA Printshop, Bard Graduate Center, The Kitchen, NMWA, Albuquerque Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, Toledo Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, and more. She currently lives in D.C. with her children and partner.
Image credit: Tsedaye Makonnen's Refuge used to live among the Hoosic River and White Oak Trees. Location: The Clark Art Institute. Dancer: Patricia Owusu. Photographer: Jon Verney. 2025.
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