Watch Now: Shala Miller presents 'Genesis: Medley', a Frieze Week Performance at Artists Space

In this video, multi-disciplinary artist, vocalist, and writer Shala Miller talks to us about their performance Genesis: Medley, produced in collaboration with Artists Space as a highlight of the Frieze Projects programming for Frieze New York.

An extension of Miller's latest three-channel installation, Genesis, at Artists Space, the performance brought together a chorus of vocalists to tell the story of Obsidian’s becoming. Obsidian is a fictional character who serves as a kind of alter ego for the artist, created at the beginning of this year to process their rage as a Black femme person.

For this project, Miller worked closely with director and composer Tariq Al-Sabir to reimagine the installation’s three-part soundtrack for live audiences, cultivating a musical arrangement and choreography that uses voice and echo as primary material. Utilizing autoethnography, song, and the artist’s years long practice of creating fictional worlds, the work is a meditation on desire, mourning, pleasure, and pain.

Shala Miller, also known as Freddie June when they sing, was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, by two southerners named Al and Ruby. At around the age of ten or eleven, Miller discovered quietude, the kind you’re sort of pushed into, and then was fooled into thinking that was where they should stay put. Since then, Miller has been trying to find their way out, and find their way into an understanding of themself and their history using photography, video, writing and singing as an aid in this process. Miller earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2017 and attended The New York Film Festival Artist Academy in 2019 and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris in 2016. Miller’s solo exhibitions include Lyles & King, New York in 2023 and Chart, New York in 2021. In 2022, Miller was included in Black Melancholia, at The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College and in Beneath Tongues, curated by Sable Elyse Smith, at Swiss Institute, New York. In 2017, Miller was an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Artists Space, founded in 1972 in downtown Manhattan, fosters the artistic and cultural life of New York City as a primary venue for artists' work in all forms. An affinity with emerging ideas and artists is central to the institution, as is attentiveness to the social and intellectual concerns which actively inform artistic practice. Artists Space strives for exemplary conditions in which to produce, experience and understand art, to be a locus of critical discourse and education and to advocate for the capacity of artistic work to significantly define and reflect our understanding of ourselves.

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