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18:30–20:00 Uhr

Album Release | 3 Lieder für Marie Nejar

Event & Podiumsdiskussion|With James Gregory Atkinson, Ahya Simone, and Alexander Ghedi Weheliye

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Join us for the vinyl release of 3 Lieder für Marie Nejar, performed by Ahya Simone – concept and production by James Gregory Atkinson. This release event will feature a panel discussion with James Gregory Atkinson, Ahya Simone, and Alexander Ghedi Weheliye.

3 Lieder für Marie Nejar investigates music as a space of memory. Artist James Gregory Atkinson’s work addresses the absence of Afro-German experiences within established narratives. Marie Nejar, born in 1930 in Mühlheim an der Ruhr, began performing as Leila Negra in the early 1950s. Her life and music were shaped by the racial exclusions of Nazi Germany and their continuities in post-war Germany.

On April 28, 2023, Detroit based harpist Ahya Simone, invited by Atkinson, reinterpreted and rearranged three songs originally recorded by Nejar between 1952 and 1955 in a live, open-air performance at Klosterruine Berlin, curated by Juliane Bischoff. These reinterpretations offer a contemporary re-engagement with Nejar’s work, understanding places, bodies, and performative practices as active carriers of history and memory.

Marie Nejar, who passed away in May 2025 at the age of 95, was, as far as the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD) is aware, the last Black survivor of Nazi Germany.

Now released on vinyl, this recording honors Nejar’s legacy, while offering a transatlantic perspective on the intertwined histories of Black life and the diasporas in Germany and the U.S. through the reinterpretation of her music by Ahya Simone.


Kindly supported by Hessische Kulturstiftung and the Goethe-Institut New York. Distribution by Bierke Verlag, Berlin. Apparent Extent AE41, 2026.

Participants

In his research-based exhibition projects, artist James Gregory Atkinson combines social and political history with autobiographical perspectives to examine the absence of Afro-German experiences within established narratives of race, identity, and nationality in Germany. By integrating documents, objects, oral histories, bodies, places, and performative practices into a living, shared archive, he reimagines memory, experience, and knowledge as relational and dynamic, with each element functioning as a historical carrier. Situated within a lineage of post-conceptual artists, Atkinson approaches the archive as a site of self-determination and a locus for critiquing power, engaging communities and significant sites through participatory methods that bring historical and contemporary experiences into dialogue, reflecting their coexisting and interwoven temporalities.

Ahya Simone is a Detroit-based harpist, singer, performance artist, and filmmaker. She earned her degree from Wayne State where she was the principal harpist for the Wayne State University Wind Symphony in 2011. She has performed extensively in Detroit, nationally and internationally and her versatile approach to harp and vocals ranges from classical, experimental,electronic, R&B, and soul. She is also a creator of an upcoming fictional web series, Femme Queen Chronicles, about the lives of four Black trans women in Detroit.

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is Malcom S. Forbes Professor of Modern Culture and Media. He teaches and researches in the areas of critical theory, Black literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005), which was awarded The Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), and Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology (2023).

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