MAMCO presents Derek Fordjour and Nick Lehane’s film Fly Away (2020) at the art fair of Geneva.

Fly Away is staging a central character–accompanied by a musician playing in near darkness. The film grew out of a performance created in collaboration with theater maker and puppet artist Nick Lehane for the 2020 exhibition SELF MUST DIE at New York’s Petzel Gallery. It is set to a score that shifts between dramatic oboe (that would not be out of place in a Schoenberg composition) and a festive steel band. It depicts a puppet, performing a sequence of everyday actions–running, falling, making awkward gestures, and trying but failing to exude gravitas. The piece ends with a funeral jazz tribute, who attempts to escape the constraints of white control, echoing Derek Fordjour’s own attempt to operate within the arena of commerce while recognizing that freedom–particularly for a Black person in America–still has limits.

Since the 2010s, Derek Fordjour, born in 1974 in Memphis to Ghanaian parents, has a practice around paintings built up by: layer upon layer of newspaper and cardboard. After applying successive coats of paint, he tears and reshapes the layered surface, producing an appearance that is simultaneously built-up and worn away. His exhibitions reveal a practice shaped by memory, drama, and catharsis. For his first major institutional solo show, held in 2020 at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, visitors were invited to enter a makeshift shelter caught in the midst of a storm. His more recent exhibition Nightsong–presented at David Kordansky Gallery in 2025 and described as a “giant music box in the dark”–was conceived as a tribute to Black American music.

 

Artists: Derek Fordjour (USA) and Nick Lehane (USA)

Technical: color digital video, sound

Duration: 32 minutes and 27 seconds

Puppeteers: Dorothy James, Rowan Magee, Andy Manjuck, Jon Riddleberger, Emma Wiseman

Music: © 2020 Hassan Anderson, John Aylward, All Rights Reserved

Oboist/Composer: Hassan Anderson

Oboist: Stuart Breczinski 
Producer: Danni Pascuma 
Composer: John Aylward
Production Stage Manager: Caren Celine Morris
Lighting and Theater Designer: Marika Kent
Sound Designer/Dramaturg: Christopher Darbassie
Movement Consultant: Joseph Lymous
Theater Design and Construction: Seth Kelly
Puppet Design: Robert Maldonado
Costume Design: Rebecca Zammito
Props Coordinator: Maggie Ellis
Props Design: Pablo Diaz