What Echoes Carry: Dr. Jareh Das on Her Curatorial Process for Frieze 2025

This year Frieze is launching a new section titled Echoes in the Present. This new addition has been curated by Dr. Jareh Das and explores the intergenerational dialogue between contemporary artists from Brazil, Africa and their diasporas. For Elephant, Dr. Jareh Das writes about her thinking during the process and shares a playlist of the songs nominated by the artists involved.

When I began shaping Echoes in the Present, the thoughts that hold this selection together kept returning to the idea of reverberation. What does it mean for histories to echo, yet not as static repetitions, but as something akin to sounds that shift, distort, and multiply as they continually travel across water, land, and time? As someone who has spent years listening to the ways artists make the past audible in the present, I was drawn to the acoustic metaphor: echoes as carriers of memory, reverberations as the persistence of things that refuse to disappear, even when they seem distant.

The idea for this curated section at Frieze London emerges from specific social, political, and cultural circumstances, entwined with the legacies of Africa and Brazil. More than four million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic to Brazil during the slave trade, and the vibrations of that violence are still felt today. However, those same reverberations also gave rise to enduring cultural and aesthetic practices, such as ways of making, speaking, and sounding, that artists continue to draw upon. Echoes in the Present is about listening closely to those frequencies. 

– Beatriz Nascimento, 1992 ¹

I am interested in how artists use materials as if they were instruments. How textiles, clay, metal, and found objects carry resonance. We can think of these as material structures and materials as signifiers in the artworks on display. Naomi Lulendo, Tadáskía, Diambe, and Mélinda Fourn, for example, work with metamorphosis and fluidity, producing artworks that feel like shifting tonalities rather than fixed forms. Their work asks us to stay attuned to transformation, to the unstable and the becoming. Equally, I think of artists such as Bunmi Agusto, Alberto Pitta, and Aline Motta as those who tune into silenced or suppressed histories. Motta’s films, often centred on water, ripple like a call across generations, while Pitta’s dazzling colours and screen-printed textiles (more recently, paintings and sculptures) resound as acts of Afro-Brazilian resistance. Agusto visualises interior landscapes shaped by diasporic identity, giving form to the echoes of belonging and unbelonging that many carry within.

Then there are artists whose practices resonate with the pulse of place: Sandra Poulson treats Luanda’s debris and detritus (dust, cardboard, soap, garments and so on) as a material archive; Serigne Mbaye Camara captures the rhythms of Dakar in colour and line. At the same time, Liliane Kiame blends oil painting and sculpture to narrate Angola’s extractive histories and their impact on contemporary life. She interrogates colonial and capitalist legacies, focusing on the exploitation of resources and their human cost. Their works remind me that echoes are not only historical; they emerge from the ordinary textures of lived experience. 

– Ayi Kwei Armah, 1979 ²

Curating this section is less about staging a neat historical narrative and more about tuning into the reverberations between artists across regions and generations. An echo is never neutral as it distorts, shifts register and lingers. To listen to these echoes in this present moment is to hear how the past lives on, sometimes faintly, sometimes insistently, in our bodies, our materials, and our landscapes.

– Katherine McCrittick, 2006.³

We live in a time marked by catastrophic wars and conflicts, ecological fragilities and disasters, migration crises, and cultural erasures. The act of listening feels urgent. The artists in Echoes in the Present do not simply represent histories; they resound them, vibrate with them, and project them forward. Their works remind us that belonging is never still, that memory can be both wound and resource, and that echoes, if we listen carefully enough, can guide us toward possible new futures.

Aline Motte

The original track that inspired the arranged 4-part harmony version of Aline Motte’s film Filha Natural / Natural Daughter (2018/2109) opening:
Clementina De Jesus – O Canto dos Escravos

Tadáskía

Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru  – Presentiment

Alberto Pitta

Gilberto Gil – Andar com fé

IZA- Fé

Bunmi Agusto

Ibeyi ft. Kamasai Washington – Deathless

Serigne Mbaye Camara

Björk – Softly – Live with Toumani Diabaté

Lilianne Kiame

Paula Flores – Matacedo

Naomi Lulendo

Moses Sumney – Gold Coast

Diambe 

Emilio Santiago – Velas Içadas

Melinda Fourn

Sunmisola Agbebi x Yinka Okeleye – Adun

Jareh Das

Duval Timothy – Dad

The Cavemen – Akaraka

Sandra Poulson

Tata – Slow J

¹ Beatriz Nascimento, “Por Um Território (Novo) Existencial e Físico” [1992], in Beatriz Nascimento. Quilombola e Intelectual. Possibilidade Nos Dias Da Destruição, ed. União dos Coletivos Pan-Africanistas [UCPA] (Diáspora Africana: Editora Filhos da África, 1992), 414; for a translation, see Smith, Davies, and Gomes, “‘In Front of the World’: Translating Beatriz Nascimento,” 305.
² Armah, Ayi Kwei, The Healers: An Historical Novel (Heinemann, 1979).
³ Katherine McKittrick, Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle (U of Minnesota Press 2006.