Professor Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal present Silk Roads Songbook

Members of the SRS team.

The soft launch of the project SRS (Silk Road Songbook) will take place at the OCAT Museum in Xi’an, China in December 2021 within a larger exhibition entitled, “Songs of a Futile Journey: Silk Road Songbook Songmingyan.” We will show a work-in-progress version of the SRS immersive audio-video installation.

SRS is a socially driven, interdisciplinary, multilingual project, co-led by the UB Department of Art's Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal that weaves songs into the land, broadcasting unruly voices on a major ancient Eurasian migration route, challenging Orientalist exoticism, cultural tourism, and censorship. The songs were created in collaboration with participants in communities along the route.

Since 2017, Chen and Ozkal have been traveling along the Silk Road meeting and workshopping with artists, musicians and scholars. https://www.silkroadsongbook.com/journey