At the end of September, Lauren Halsey collapsed time in on itself. For one night only—or perhaps for a minute, or perhaps for eternity—the Los Angeles-born mixed media artist collated the dreamlike imaginary of years past, the present, and the prospect of Afrofuturity in emajendat, with Anderson .Paak, Flea, The Alchemist, and Erykah Badu.

emajendat, Halsey’s ongoing immersive and interactive artistic project which first launched at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2024, manifested at the Hollywood Bowl as a “funk opera,” wherein the entire venue served as the canvas soaked in Black futurist thematics: a technicolor stage, mini golf and basketball and large scale art installations, custom costumes and staff shirts. References to the old and the new converged to form a historiography of Black LA, leaving us with the questions: Who gets to write history? What new methods take shape to tell history? 

“The idea of getting to dress people, work with a costume designer to style them, make staff shirts, think about someone’s hair and work with a hair artist—it’s a total artwork,” Halsey shares of the production process. “The wayfinding, the signage, all of it is part of the work. It’s also the most stressful thing because it’s a lot. But I couldn’t be happier with it,” she explains. 

Throughout the night, which was supported by LA Phil, it was evident as .Paak bobbed his head behind the turntables, Badu crooned from the depths of her soul, dancers boogied the stage in Tutankhamun headdresses,and roller derby skaters twisted around, that maybe, just maybe, fantasy and reality don’t need to be antithetical to one another. Fantasy was the mode of cosmology for typifying historical truth, in the same way the personal and political so-often converge ambiguously in real life. This was—this is—real life. 

Halsey wished to speak to the creativity of her collaborators in the language she knew how, transforming the entirety of the venue into a new world. Halsey’s modality of play and line of work often transcends the gallery site. “I’ve always wanted to make space since I was a kid," Halsey posits. “The cosmic, the pyramid world, the street world, reality, Aqua Boogie—the Parliament-Funkadelic underwater world—layered with Black poetry across many generations and eras. It’s spaciousness. Everything fits.”

She continues, delving into the interplay between site and performance. “It’s a more macro way that I think about how I relate to space…when I think about space in Los Angeles, it’s always the same: it’s a record of my neighborhood. It’s not an anthropological record where it’s, “This is what they were wearing, what they were doing, and who they were in 1962.” It’s that, but funkified. It’s the cosmos. I’m looking at an ancient Egyptian pyramid paired with a guy on Figueroa, paired with poets from Watts in ’76, all in one composition, and it makes sense to me. It’s about turning time on its head.”

Halsey explains feeling “agnostic about the way I think about space and place and how they conflate,” and it’s why emajendat works so well. As patrons filed into the world of emajendat at the Hollywood Bowl, they were tasked with suspending their disbelief to write themselves into the historical record. Halsey’s dedication to documenting the character of Black LA has always served to focus on semiotically identifying the strong visual language that shapes South Central. She ends up transmuting her findings into something that feels universal, yet still precious and specific all at once.

Perhaps then, emajendat’s ephemeral quality comes as an amalgam of all of the enjoyments of the human condition. It’s why the project doesn’t end at the one-night immersion inside the gates of the Hollywood Bowl, growing beyond the bounds of containment. emajendat puts forth a new way of thinking through time and spatiality. She is hopeful that the project will grow and expand over time to reflect longevity and community stature. She is, of course, thinking about the future. Halsey concludes, “All of this is a proof of concept for year two, and for this idea of bringing the ambition of what we do for museums and galleries in the fine art world to everyday folks. The idea is that these objects will travel to the next one, and I’ll expand upon them. The inventory of material objects and structures will grow and grow and grow. By year five, I can’t wait to see what we have to work and play with—to actually design something. Perhaps it becomes a fair. That’s what’s so liberating about it. I don’t know yet, and the newness is just great.”