Vleeshal

‘Why Patterns?’

02 Apr - 11 Jun 2017

Milan Grygar, ‘Acoustic drawing’, 1969
Photo: Josef Prošek
‘WHY PATTERNS?’
02 April – 11 June 2017

Curator: Roos Gortzak

With: Noa Eshkol, Daan Gielis, Radna Rumping, Damon Zucconi, Milan Grygar, Lina Lapelyte, Les Trucs, Sergei Tcherepnin, Hannah Weinberger

Why Patterns? is a group exhibition that brings together contemporary and historical artists who share a common interest in experimental music. In their work they explore forms of coincidence, improvisation, and abstract notational systems.

The exhibition includeS sound sculptures, audio, scores, textiles, video, drawings, and performance. Its title is borrowed from a 1978 musical composition by Morton Feldman with the same name. Feldman was one of the many international composers and musicians that Ad van ‘t Veer brought to Middelburg for the high-profiled festival Nieuwe Muziek, which ran from 1976 to 2003.

For his composition Why Patterns? Feldman was inspired by abstract expressionism and rugs from the Middle East. Feldman saw a link between the way in which carpet makers dealt with pattern making, in which one pattern was never more significant than another, and the way in which he worked as a composer. The exhibition Why Patterns? explores how non-hierarchal methodologies are being used in artistic practice today.
On Saturday April 1, Les Trucs performed Das Frosch/Vogel Lied, a composition especially developed for this show. Les Trucs (French for “the things”) are Toben Piel and Charlotte Simon, a duo from Frankfurt working together in the fields of electronic music, performance and fine arts. They gathered a “choir of technical diversity” around them, to be installed within their floor-score for Das Frosch/Vogel Lied: a super-8 camera (robot), midi grid loops, a drum, a synthesizer, a keyboard, and voice amplifying backpacks. Floating around on the Markt and inside of the Vleeshal, they “hovered” through their own composition while singing a poem by German writer Nis Momme Stockmann.
 

Tags: Milan Grygar, Sergei Tcherepnin, Hannah Weinberger