About this Event
Join YATTA alongside Cyrus Moussavi (director of of Mississippi Records) and Jamal Khadar (founder of Reimagining Country on NTS Radio) for a listening session exploring pioneering Sierra Leonean palm wine musician S.E. Rogie's place in the palm wine genre as well as its long conversation with country and American indie music genres. West African Palm Wine will be served.
Part of YATTA's Recess Session, Iron + Palm Wine: Koneh Pelawoe.
Through Rogie’s musical legacy, YATTA explores the entanglements of Blackness, land, leisure, and extraction, asking what becomes possible when the psychic weight of labor, migration, and extraction is, even briefly, set down. Drawing on palm wine music as a balm for the psychic wounds of the transatlantic slave trade, YATTA considers whether Black wandering might offer a healing reversal to the fraught relationship between Black people and U.S. landscapes that are steeped in forced migration and labor.
About the speakers
Cyrus Moussavi is an Iranian-American filmmaker and music archivist and the director of Mississippi Records, which re-released Rogie’s music. Through the label, he has collaborated with artists and their heirs to release dozens of albums from around the world and across generations. His music documentaries and videos have screened at festivals including Sundance and BlackStar, and on the Criterion Channel and Mubi. His latest film, Windows of Time, co-directed with Hubert Theotis Taylor, will screen at festivals and informal gatherings throughout 2026 and 2027 before airing on PBS in the 2027–28 season.
Jamal Khadarof writes liner notes for Mississippi Records and is a writer, broadcaster, and DJ. He founded Reimagining Country on NTS Radio, a show exploring country music’s global past and present, with particular attention to the two-way exchange between American country and roots music and African music in the 20th century. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Bandcamp Daily, and The European Review of Books, and his work has been featured in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He has lectured at Goldsmiths and Newcastle University, released archival music with Mississippi Records, and regularly interviews country artists from around the world during their tour stops in Amsterdam and London.
YATTA is a Sierra Leonean-American artist and composer working across film, sound, and installation.
In 2024, they released PALM WINE, named one of The Wire’s Best Albums of 2024. Drawing from the legacy of their great-uncle, pioneering Sierra Leonean guitarist S.E. Rogie, the album reimagines palm wine music through storytelling, layered vocals, sampling, and experimental composition.
Their film, installation, and exhibition work includes FATHAGOD.EXE at Blade Study and Iron + Palm Wine at Art Omi’s Newmark Gallery. Their music has appeared in films like Nanny and Seeking Mavis Beacon, and their writing has been published in Pioneer Works’ Broadcast and The Brooklyn Rail.
YATTA’s work has been presented at MoMA, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, The Shed, Tate Modern, MOCA, The Getty, Performance Space, Poetry Project, and Rewire Festival. As an educator and speaker, YATTA has contributed to programmes at Bard College, New Inc, Pioneer Works, NYU’s Clive Davis Institute, Princeton, The New School, and Wesleyan University.
About the Project
For their Session at Recess, YATTA transforms the gallery into an evolving pre-production environment for Iron + Palm Wine: Koneh Pelawoe, a sound and moving-image installation that will serve as the narrative foundation for the first episode of their podcast and documentary project, Iron + Palm Wine. Named after S.E. Rogie’s song “Koneh Pelawoe,” meaning “Please Open Your Heart,” the project begins with a personal discovery: Rogie, the pioneering Sierra Leonean palm wine musician, was YATTA’s great-uncle.
Visitors will encounter an evolving space for sound, image, reading, and writing. At its center is an ongoing body of poetry written in response to Camille Dungy’s book Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, alongside an invitation to read a passage aloud, record a response, or write a poem of their own. A record player will play Rogie’s music, while archival materials—including videos relating to Black nature music—will be available to explore. The space may also hold live moments of music-making, experimentation, and collaboration.
About Session
Recess’s Session program offers artists flexible time and space to develop ambitious projects in a public setting. Visitors encounter works-in-progress, installations, and collaborative experiments as they evolve in real time.
Session supports the creation of new work by giving artists a project stipend, artist’s fee, technical support, mentorship, and approximately two months to transform Recess into a hybrid of a productive studio space dynamic exhibition platform. Throughout the session, we will facilitate public interactions with the Recess community, as well as connections among intentional communities as identified by each artist. Our hope is that these engagements provide an opportunity for mutually beneficial exchanges that not only refine the artists’ thinking, but that challenge dominant narratives and activate new forms of artmaking.
About Recess
Recess partners with artists, youth, writers, and their chosen publics to create transformative cultural experiences.
Our programs welcome radical thinkers to imagine and shape networks of resilience and safety. By challenging dominant narratives and activating new forms of creative production, Recess defines and advances the possibilities of contemporary art.
Recess is free and open to the public to serve as a meeting place to generate art, ideas and actions.
Support our mission.
Event venue & nearby stays
Recess, 46 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.