Walker Art Center Presents Free All Day Festival, Resonance: A Sound Art Marathon
Note: Due to adverse weather conditions, Resonance: A Sound Art Marathon has been relocated to the McGuire Theater.
An ear freshener and eye opener, this day of performances is inspired by the Walker’s 1980 New Music America festival and the trajectory of jazz experimentation at the Walker. Encouraging artists working between visual and performing arts to experiment and try new modes of expression, the Walker has been producing, presenting, and commissioning sound art performances and installations for more than 50 years. Sculpture sings and sound takes shape as the visual (instruments, sculpture) and the aural (sonic landscapes, jazz, found sound) are layered in conceptual confluence.
This day-long free program is informed by those many years and artists that have shaped the way we perceive sound and art within interdisciplinary experimentation. Embodying the essence of this conceptual framework, the international artists of Resonance—Matana Roberts, Craig Taborn and Camille Norment, Walter Kitundu, Tarek Atoui, Haroon Mirza, Philip Blackburn, Jules Gimbrone, and Christine Sun Kim—perform in auditory and visual accord with the audience while exploring the fault lines between a visual art exhibition and sound performance.
Resonance is one of nine new projects organized by the Walker as part of a three-year Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to support projects that challenge artists to create new work in unfamiliar settings or disciplines. The Cowles Pavilion provides an exciting, catalytic space for artists to premiere new work.
Curated by Doug Benidt and Pavel Pyś, with Simone Austin and Allie Tepper.
Resonance: A Sound Art Marathon of new music performances is free and begins at 12 noon and ends at 10 pm in the Cowles Pavilion in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden on Saturday, May 18. This is a rain or shine event.
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12 noon Philip Blackburn with Heather Barringer and Preston Wright
1:30pm Christine Sun Kim
2:30pm Walter Kitundu
4pm Jules Gimbrone
5:30pm Matana Roberts
7pm Craig Taborn and Camille Norment
8:30pm Tarek Atoui (solo)
9pm Tarek Atoui performs with Haroon Mirza’s light installation
FOOD + DRINK
Enjoy delicious food (including grab and go options for the Garden) and craft cocktails at Esker Grove. 10:30am – 10pm.
GALLERY ADMISSION
Refresh with a stroll through the Walker galleries, open until 6 pm. Ages 0–18 get in free!
RESTROOMS
Restrooms are available on the west side of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden or inside the Walker’s main entrance.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Philip Blackburn with Heather Barringer and Preston Wright
Since the 19th century, architecture has sometimes been described as “frozen music.” What better way to celebrate the Cowles Pavilion than turning its design blueprints into a soundscape?
Christine Sun Kim
Caption America, 2019
Christine Sun Kim uses sound in performance and drawing to investigate her relationship with spoken languages and her aural environment. Caption America uses sound captions from movies and TV shows, combining them with printed images and objects to create stories about the interiority/exteriority of sound.
Walter Kitundu
Songela: sounds for red, 2019
For Resonance, musician, visual artist, and MacArthur Fellow Walter Kitundu, has developed a multichannel performance with several hand-built instruments. Made in tribute to human rights activist Malcolm X, the work explores racial injustice, police violence, and black political movements with material drawn from the natural world. Through music, the piece examines how systemic oppression manifests in the human relationship to the natural world and through western capitalist ideologies.
Camille Norment and Craig Taborn
Again, 2019
Camille Norment and Craig Taborn take a 1950s “golden age” automobile as the site of sonic focus. From Benjamin Franklin’s rare glass armonica, to the electronic promise of the future unknown, Again contemplates the ideologies of returning to an idealized past.
Haroon Mirza
Waxing Gibbous, 2019
London-based British artist Haroon Mirza is recognized for installations that amplify imperceptible phenomena, pointing to the relationships between optics and acoustics. Waxing Gibbous is an installation of LED lights made specifically for the Cowles Pavilion, conceived in dialogue with Tarek Atoui’s I/E to transform the space into an immersive environment.
Tarek Atoui
I/E, (ongoing)
Paris-based Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui premieres a new iteration of the ongoing project I/E using a custom-built mixer that samples sounds sourced from below ground and water surfaces. Gathered from under the sea, ports, and below cityscapes, the sounds form a new musical composition that is composed and improvised live. I/E creates a layered sonic landscape that is at once its own as well as considered in dialogue to Haroon Mirza’s Waxing Gibbous.
Jules Gimbrone
The Whole Is Also a Hole, 2019
New York–based artist Jules Gimbrone creates sonic installations that explore the phenomenology of resonance. The Whole Is Also a Hole is a corporeal sculptural machine composed of glass vessels filled with organic matter that are charged and broken by sound. Phonetic utterances are tuned and re-tuned until liquids jump, shake, and release, causing a disorientation of source, selfhood, and direction. The machine is performed on live by Gimbrone and autonomously—functioning as instrument, performer, ensemble, and stage.
Matana Roberts
Untitled, 2019
New York and London–based artist Matana Roberts is an award winning, internationally renowned composer, bandleader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner. For Resonance, Roberts presents a solo work for the saxophone that responds to both the Cowles Pavilion as well as Black Vessel for a Saint (2017), a Minneapolis Sculpture Garden commission by the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates.