The Norton Lectures with Steve McQueen | Lecture Three

Tickets are free and will be available starting one week before the lecture through the Harvard Box Office. Please note: Event registration does not count as a ticket for this event.

2025-26 Norton Professor of Poetry:

Featured Performer: , Musician & Poet

Discussants: , Yale University; , Columbia University

Moderator: , Dia Art Foundation

Commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation and Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, Basel, Bass (2024) is an immersive installation comprised of the most basic structural elements of film—light and sound—that upends our perception of space, time, and ourselves. Focused on the titular instrument of the bass, the work features sound created by an intergenerational group of Afrodiasporic musicians who worked together to bring this low-end frequency that typically operates in the background to the foreground. Coupled with deeply saturated overhead lights that cycle through the full spectrum of visible color, through this work McQueen essentially sculpts with light and sound. Inspired in part by the Middle Passage and the transatlantic journey of the enslaved, Bass offers a journey through past and present, or, as the artist describes it, “[puts] the public in a situation where everyone becomes acutely sensitive to themselves.”

Renowned bassist, singer-songwriter, and poet, Meshell Ndegeocello, one of the five contributors to the soundtrack for Bass, will perform. Following the performance, McQueen will be in dialogue with one of the curators of Bass, Donna De Salvo, Senior Adjunct Curator, Dia Art Foundation, Noam M. Elcott, Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, and Michael E. Veal, author, musician, and the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at Yale University, to discuss the work’s sonic component and use of spectrum color.

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Host or Publisher Mahindra Humanities Center