keiyaA + Dawuna

Seated concert in the Auditorium.

The Bourse de Commerce will host an evening featuring keiyaA and Dawuna, two artists at the forefront of New York’s R&B scene. 

This event forms part of the Bourse de Commerce’s collaboration with the German museum Haus der Kunst, where the two artists will also perform on 23 June. In 2023, from Paris to Munich, the Bourse de Commerce and the Haus der Kunst will unveil common musical projects that bring several generations of avant-garde artists together to create new bonds between contemporary art and music. In February 2023, the two institutions offer a concert by the post-punk dub band Lifetones, led by British musician Charles Bullen.

keiyaA is an American singer and multi-instrumentalist born in Chicago in 1992. As a child, she began by playing on a Casio keyboard, imitating the jingles she heard on television. She then joined the Chicago Public Schools music programme, where she learned saxophone, an instrument she would play through her time at university. When she met rappers and producers whom she watched create freely on their computers, she began to produce her own tracks. In 2015, she released her first EP, Work, after which she moved to New York City, where she produced evening concerts. In March 2020, keiyaA released her first album, the resilient Forever, Ya Girl, which she produced on her own label, and which won critics and audiences over in a heartbeat. The album features a series of introspective R&B and electronica songs.

Dawuna is an American lyricist-composer and multi-instrumentalist born in Maryland. He spent his early childhood in Nairobi, Kenya, and returned to the US, in Virginia, at the age of five. He remembers having to deal with racism since childhood. As a teenager, he discovered gospel, Aretha Franklin, and Mahalia Jackson, as well as Peace Be Still by the Reverend James Cleveland, whose powerful voice made a lasting impression on him. In 2019, his move to New York City marked the beginning of his journey towards resilience. He began recording music in his basement apartment. 2021 saw the release of his album Glass Lit Dream, with its blending of down-tempo, R&B, and soul electronica, tinged with nuances of gospel, an aesthetic he describes as cold, lunar, and digital. The London label O____o remastered the album the following year, and in 2022, it released EP1, three minimalist neo-soul tracks that combine delicate rhythms, light drones, and samplings from recordings of the Black Panthers, sung in his high-pitched, deformed voice against acoustic percussion.

For logistical and technical reasons, American designer Dozie Kanu will not be presenting a scenography for the event.