Driver Brother(s)
Wednesday, July 23, 2025, 7–9pmDriver Brother(s) takes inspiration from Karimah Ashadu’s Machine Boys and the Okada riders of Lagos to explore the lives of taxi drivers in New York and London, cities with idiosyncratic and iconic taxi culture. Featuring the film Driver Brother by Kenneth Tam and Sleepdust: Uber Drivers Singing Lullabies by Ceyda Oskay, these filmmakers use their poetic lenses and artistic interventions to address the highs and lows of being a taxi driver. All films conjure philosophical responses from the drivers as they question their dreams, memories of childhood, their regrets and debts, and ultimately life and death.
Driver Brother by Kenneth Tam, 2024, 26 minutes
Artist Kenneth Tam’s experimental documentary Driver Brother follows a group of immigrant cab drivers and poetically presents their struggle to acquire and maintain ownership of NYC taxi medallions.
Sleepdust: Uber Drivers Singing Lullabies by Ceyda Oskay, 2019, 9 minutes
Sleepdust: Uber Drivers Singing Lullabies, has been interpreted to be a work about labor, migration, gender, care, music, and how often we are asleep to any conflict around the world. It is a series of recordings of lullabies that the artist asked Uber drivers (and one black cab driver) in London to sing when she had broken her foot and was an invited resident artist at the Migration Museum in London (March, 2019) - thinking of sleep as a form of healing.
Kenneth Tam was born in Queens, NY and attended the Cooper Union. He has had solo exhibitions at Bridget Donahue, NY; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), CA; Cantor Arts Center, CA; Ballroom Marfa, TX; ICA LA, CA; Queens Museum, NY; and MIT List Visual Arts Center, MA. He is a recipient of grants from Art Matters, the Jerome Foundation, NYFA and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles. Tam is based in Houston, TX and is assistant professor at Rice University, as well as faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Ceyda Oskay collaborates with people, places, and materials. Her work is inter-disciplinary, often site-responsive, and socially engaged. She recently created a band called, “Surgical Instruments,” creating electronic music from her grandfather’s surgical tools and watercolor and embroidered organs. The band will be putting out an album of songs played thematically by groups of non-professionals musically improvising their common surgery experiences.
Previous work includes digging the outline of the seas between India and the Middle East and collecting words in common between Hindi, Gujarati, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Part of Oskay’s practice is rooted in making healing clothes such as Talismanic T-shirts as part of her clothing brand cc by co. These are often dyed, printed, or painted - sometimes with natural dyes collected on travels. Oskay’s work is informed by personal experiences of migration and humanitarian work. She has moved several times and been to over 26 countries and has over ten years of experience with forced migration and development.
Her work has been shown at SomArts, California; The Royal Academy, London; Liverpool Alternates Biennial; as well as at the Sadu House Textile Arts Association in Kuwait; Textile Arts Factory, Greece; 5533 and Pasaj in Turkiye, TAPI Arts Festival, India; Textile Arts Residency, Iceland, VCAS, Austria, and other locations.
Oskay holds a BA from the University of Chicago, and an MA in Public Sphere, Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art. She is currently teaching art and fashion in Istanbul.
