In conjunction with The Living Temple, the ongoing exhibition celebrating the life and work of Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry, Ars Nova Workshop presents Cherry’s granddaughter, artist/musician, Naima Nefertari, for a special performance with spiritual jazz soothsayer Angel Bat Dawid at Solar Myth on Monday, March 9.

Naima Nefertari – daughter of vocalist Neneh Cherry and granddaughter of artistic visionaries Don and Moki Cherry – is a multi-disciplinary artist and musician based in London. Her practice interweaves sonic and visual forms led by interests in repetition, improvisation, and the abstract relationships between language, symbol, image, and sound. Nefertari is part of the duo Exotic Sin with Kenichi Iwasa, and she is an archivist and coordinator for the Estate of Moki Cherry and Cherry Archive.

For the first of two performances, she’ll be joined for a duo outing by the composer, clarinetist, singer & spiritual jazz soothsayer Angel Bat Dawid. The potency, prowess, spirit and charisma of Dawid’s cosmic musical proselytizing has taken her from relatively unknown improviser to borderline ubiquitous performer in Chicago’s avant-garde in a relatively short span of time. A powerful meditation on memory, mythology, and ancestral science, Dawid and Nefertari’s collaboration draws deep inspiration from the ancient astrological stone circle of Nabta Playa, nestled in the remote deserts of Nubia. Their music blends spiritual jazz, celestial electronics, ancestral instrumentation, and storytelling to imagine futures grounded in ancient knowing.