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Gladstone Gallery 515 West 24th Street: Allora & Calzadilla : Stop, Repair, Prepare - 23 Jan 2009 to 21 Feb 2009 Current Exhibition |
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Allora & Calzadilla Stop, Repair, Prepare January 23 - February 21, 2009 515 West 24 Street Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition with Puerto Rican-based artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. Since 1995, Allora & Calzadilla have developed a complex artistic vocabulary through which they engage with history and contemporary geo-political realities. Utilizing films, installations, performances, and sculpture, the artists address sites of power as their platform for artistic experimentation, exposing their complicated dynamics, destabilizing and re-ordering them in ways that can be alternately humorous, poetic, and revelatory. Allora & Calzadilla have often investigated how sound structures and is structured by social relationships. In Clamor (2005) hired musicians partially hidden within a sculptural rendition of a bunker, orchestrated an aural confrontation of different music used in war, from well known Souza marches to less likely songs such as Twisted Sister�s �We�re Not Gonna Take It� and Barney the Dinosour�s �I Love You� used to torture prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. The work posited age-old sonic militarism against the contours of its relationship to contemporary culture and political ideology. For this exhibition, they will present Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, which was originally exhibited at Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2008. Once again blending sculpture and performance, Allora & Calzadilla have carved a hole in the center of an early 20th-century Bechstein piano, creating a void through which the performer stands to play the Fourth Movement of Beethoven�s Ninth Symphony. Commonly known as �Ode to Joy,� it has long been invoked as a musical representation of human fraternity and universal brotherhood in contexts as ideologically disparate, and arguably exclusionary, as the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Ian Smith�s White Supremacist Rhodesia, and the Third Reich among many others. Today it is the official anthem of the European Union. Expanding the notions of both a prepared-piano and a player-piano, the performer must reach over the keyboard and resituate his/her fingering of the keys both upside down and backwards while at times physically mobilizing the instrument to trace a path through the gallery. This unique mode of recital creates variations on the corporeal as well as sonic dimension of the player/instrument dynamic. Allora & Calzadilla explore the fluid and organic relationships inherent in music, exposing the varied dynamics between composition and meaning, instrument and performance, while tracking the political and artistic sentiments involved in music�s history. Throughout the exhibition, there will be hourly performances, Tuesday through Saturday. Jennifer Allora (born 1974, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (born 1971, Cuba) have been collaborating since 1995. They have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions around the world, including presentations at Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein M�nchen; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; San Francisco Art Institute; Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Zurich; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. They have also been included in group exhibitions such as �Prospect 1 New Orleans,� 2008; �After Nature,� New Museum, New York, 2008; the 9th Lyon Biennale, 2007; 2006 Whitney Biennial; �Uncertain States of America,� Astrup Fearnley Museum of Museum Art, Oslo, 2005; and 2005 Venice Biennale. For further information please contact Eric Nylund at 212 206 9300 or enylund @gladstonegallery.com Also on view: Fausto Melotti 12 Rue du Grand Cerf, Brussels |
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