Saidiya Hartman’s theory has already left a visible mark on contemporary art. With Minor Music at the End of the World, the Columbia professor has now stepped into performance as an artist in her own right.
Hartman, best known for the method she calls “critical fabulation,” has spent years influencing artists who work with archives, colonial histories, and the gaps left by official records. Her approach uses speculation and theory to reconstruct lives and experiences that were never fully documented, especially those shaped by oppression and enslavement. That influence has been acknowledged in exhibitions and museum projects at the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA PS1, and MoMA. Now Hartman is moving from inspiration to authorship.
Minor Music at the End of the World is a three-part performance that imagines the end of white supremacy. It is based on Hartman’s 2020 essay “The End of White Supremacy,” which responds to W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Comet. The work opened with a 40-minute monologue and unfolds through a second movement drawn from the unpublished essay Dead River, followed by a third movement that reworks Arthur Jafa’s AGHDRA (2020).
The piece is deeply collaborative. Arthur Jafa contributes cinematic elements, Precious Okoyomon provides sculptures, and Peter Born supplies sound. André Holland and Okwui Okpokwasili are the lead performers, while Cameron Rowland is credited as the “Attendant of the Archive.” Hartman said the project developed through readings and rehearsals, with support from the Hartwig Art Foundation and HAF.
The performance recently had a run in Venice, where its themes echoed the Biennale’s main exhibition, In Minor Keys. That resonance feels apt: Hartman’s work is not simply about history, but about the pressure history exerts on the present. In Minor Music at the End of the World, her writing becomes embodied, collective, and theatrical — a rare shift for a thinker whose ideas have already helped define the visual language of the moment.
