Taj teamed up with long time friend and music collaborator “producer Eric Hoegemeyer” during the summer of 2020 for songs that have been written in response to recent events in the United States, directly addressing the systemic prejudice faced by African Americans. “How does one inspire the idea of hope?” she cries. It’s a raw and powerful question which many of us are asking. The honesty is brutal, the delivery powerful, the effect devastating. These are songs of pain, yet they channel an articulate anger, fuelled with focus and clarity. Truth can be distressing, but it needs to be told, and we are lucky to have Taj as our witness.
Dystopic Symptoms is an artist collective, which is hung out between past and future. The collective tries to express their stuckness, criticisms, concerns, and feelings about shallow political discourses, every kind of bigotry and bias, anthropogenic hazards, in short failures of the Anthropocene, through creating art pieces that are in hybrid performative forms.
In Summer 2021 Dystopic Symptoms was invited to collaborate between Berlin and Detroit by Your Mom’s Berlin Agency and dublab for the EXP__The video piece, I Can’t Breathe, was created by Serra and Mert from Dystopic Symptoms for the music piece by Taj. The video collage puts together images of different moments from different locations to reflect on continuously ongoing vicious acts of humanity..