My Lifetime Screening at 98 Weeks
As part of the “Specters Of: Part 2” screenings, the 98 Weeks Project Space will be hosting a screening of the short film “My Lifetime” by Katarina Zdejalar.
The video piece “My Lifetime” (Malaika) features Ghana’s National Symphony Orchestra, which was established in the late 1950s under the government of Kwame Nkrumah, performing Malaika – an originally cheerful and empowering postcolonial composition. Being a part of this political and cultural legacy, the national orchestra today has become an institution which has witnessed this shift of one social rule to another.
The film highlights the discrepancy between how Western musical tradition has never fully been integrated into Ghanaian culture and how the Ghanaian state continues sponsoring such an institution, which cannot be abolished without provoking political turmoil, but is also too insignificant in contemporary Ghanaian society to be supported financially. However, “My Lifetime” (Malaika) is neither a portrait of the musicians nor a documentary on the orchestra itself. Katarina Zdjelar, rather, deploys the orchestra in order to draw a sketch of a complicated state of affairs in which grand ideas and the mechanism of a nation state project takes root in and affects individuals.
