Soothsayer Serenades I Beautiful People by Sarp Dakni

Today we are thrilled to present the second playlist of Amrita Hepi’s Soothsayer Serenades series as part of the Notes for Tomorrow exhibition. The playlist titled Beautiful People is presented by Sarp Dakni on Pera Museum’s Spotify account.

The project Soothsayer Serenades is a provocation for moving together while apart, without proof of presence.

Each Wednesday, across 3 weeks, a new playlist and provocation will be released. We are inviting everyone to listen the playlist at 4 pm.

Amrita Hepi is a dancer and choreographer with an interdisciplinary practice. In Soothsayer Seranades, she invites collaborators to develop playlists accompanied by provocations to move which are released via the music streaming service Spotify. This format provides insights into how the COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated ways of rethinking how art can be experienced and distributed across place and time to transcend geographical and physical boundaries. The pandemic has highlighted how the internet and free social media platforms have provided connectivity during a time when we have been estranged from friends, family, community and workplaces.

The playlists in Soothsayer Seranades encourage listeners to actively participate, to reach out, and enable others to move in the shared moment of its release. The physicality of dance and the sensory qualities of music provide an experience of embodiment that either counters the isolating conditions of lockdown or suggests ways of reconnecting thereafter. The work invites us to experience the present, while also referencing the role of a soothsayer who has clairvoyant abilities to predict the future. If the pandemic has provided a portal to imagine different ways of being and living in the future, Soothsayer Serenades demonstrates an artistic response to how we could re-imagine our shared, global community and reaffirms the importance of our interconnection to each other. 

About Sarp Dakni 

Editor, music writer and DJ. He was born in 1975 in Ankara. He studied Protohistory and Pre-Asian Archeology at Hacettepe University. Listening to music has always been at the center of his life. He stepped into the world of dogs with Pöti, whom he adopted from a shelter and suddenly entered his life. For more than 10 years, he has been working on the treatment and home finding of abandoned dogs with his project Meet Him. He lives in a 130-year-old neo-classical stone house in Ayvalık with his four dogs.