In celebration of The Gund’s fifteenth anniversary this fall, Zami and Chi will perform a piece entitled Wings to Fly: Frida Kahlo Boléro for Gund visitors at our opening reception for the fall 2026 exhibitions on September 15th from 4 to 6 PM.

Wings to Fly: Frida Kahlo Boléro was originally created as a commissioned work commemorating and celebrating the resilience of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Her biography and legacy is situated at a crossroads between multiple artistic genres, gender identities and cultural heritages. Oxana Chi’s choreography takes Maurice Béjart’s iconic Boléro as its starting point, creating an interplay between elements of French ballet, Caribbean bélè and German expressionist dance. The live-music composed and performed by Layla Zami on the saxophone similarly departs from Ravel’s Boléro, a composition commissioned by choreographer Ida Rubinstein, while bringing classical and contemporary European and Afrodiasporic forms into dialogue.

With each iteration of the work, the scenography has been shaped by the particularities of each site in New York, Berlin and Fortaleza and reimagined by local artists. At the Gund, the performance will encounter the collection exhibition Where Ideas Begin, with Faith Ringgold’s Dancing at the Louvre becoming a particular point of resonance. In a contextualizing talk, Dr. Layla Zami responds to Ringgold’s work and other art historical examples, tracing their relationalities across geographic, kinesthetic, and sonic borderlands.

Concept, Choreography, Dance: Oxana Chi Live-Music and Composition: Layla Zami (saxophone, loops) With citations by Maurice Ravel, Juan Tizol, Charles Mingus Costume Design: Dorês Maués

This program is made possible in part with support of Villa Albertine, ANdÉA and The Gund.

About the Artists:

Dr. Layla Zami is a French-Caribbean interdisciplinary academic, artist and musician. Her research, teaching, and creative work orbit around cultural memory, diaspora, performance (studies), art (history), and spacetime. She is professor at the Campus Caraïbéen des Arts, an art and design college founded by Aimé Césaire in Martinique, where she is in charge of entangled art histories, performance studies and the graduate research seminar. Zami was an adj. associate professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she co-chaired Black Lives Matter at Pratt. Other research and teaching appointments include NYU Berlin, Columbia University, Freie Universität Berlin, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she earned a PhD in transdisciplinary gender studies and a teaching quality award. The author of Contemporary PerforMemory: Dancing Through Spacetime, Historical Trauma and Diaspora in the 21st Century (Oscar G. Brockett Prize for Dance Research, Honorable Mention, 2023), she published articles in Women & Performance, liquid blackness, and Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie among others. She has written commissioned art historical essays for Wendy’s Subway in New York, Royal College of Art in London, and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and exhibited her own photography art in Berlin, Paris, and Cape Town. A delicate and versatile saxophone player, Zami creates and performs music/sounds/theater for Oxana Chi Dance & Art. She holds a saxophone diploma from the Conservatory of Le Mans and trained with Parageet and Fuasi Abdul-Khaliq. Together with her wife, she has gratefully and gracefully performed from Toronto to Taipei by way of Tampere. Her play Broken Bet was created with the LABA NY hub. Her latest sound creations were commissioned by The Kitchen NYC (Corpuscular Cores, 2023) and the exhibition On Water at Humboldt-Forum Berlin (Black Diasporic Dissolving, 2025-2027). www.laylazami.net

Oxana Chi is a German-Nigerian dancer-choreographer, curator, filmmaker and author. At the heart of her feminist practice is an exploration of how our present is built upon in/visible remnants of the past and its porous relationship to our futures. Her repertoire comprises 20 productions, including commissions for The Kitchen New York and Humboldt-University Berlin. A keynote performer at the Black German Heritage & Research Association Conference, she has performed on the five continents at venues and festivals including Volksbühne Berlin, Schauspielhaus Dortmund, Biennale Passages Bielefeld, Jack Crystal Theater NYC, Dixon Place, Delhi International Queer Theatre and Film Festival, Solo International Performing Arts Festival Surakarta, Taipei Fringe Festival, as well as many universities such as Rutgers University, University of Toronto, Goldsmith University, University of Ghana Legon, Universidade Federal do Ceará. She was a resident in Abrons Arts Center’s AIRspace program, The Brick Brooklyn, JCAL Queens, and a Co-Curator of Dance for the International Human Rights Art Festival in New York. Teaching appointments include Freie Universitaet Berlin and NYU. Listed in The Dance Enthusiast’s “A to Z of People Who Power The Dance World”, Chi is a 2023 Performance Studies international awardee. Her work appears in several books and journals including Dance Research Journa_l, _Women & Performance, and Black Lives Under Nazism. Her multidisciplinary exhibition and performance project celebrating three decades of artistic productions culminated in the publication Sichtbar Bleiben: Black Lesbian Archives Matter! Based in Martinique since 2025, her new drawing practice led to exhibitions in the collective and solo shows An Ba Fey at Le Rond-Point des Arts, Fort-de-France (2026) and Ko, Kay, Kafou at Alliance française, Fortaleza (2025) shows, where she also performed Wings to Fly. www.oxanachi.de