Islands in the Stream | Sound art exhibition
at Chelouche Gallery for Contemporary Art
As part of Tzlil Meudcan Festival | Curator and Artistic Director: Yaron Deutsch
Exhibition and Festival Opening Event: Saturday, 18.07.15, 8:30pm
On the opening event a live concert will be held in the gallery’s top floor.
With the participation of Håkon Stene (Norway) and Amit Dubester (Israel)
Concert Program: Karlheinz Stockhausen – in Freundschaft for soprano saxophone (1977)
Laurence Crane – Bobby J for electric guitar (1999)
For full festival program click here
Exhibition text in Hebrew
On Saturday, 18th of July, Chelouche Gallery will host the grand opening of Tzlil Meudcan Festival for Contemporary Music 2015, directed by Yaron Deutsch. In parallel with the festival days, Chelouche Gallery for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv will be hosting the sound art exhibition – “Islands in the Stream” presenting in its 3 floors works by Leif Inge, Johannes Kreidler, Amnon Wolman, Uli Fussenegger, Simon Steen-Andersen and John Cage.
Special opening hours during the exhibition:
Sunday – Thursday, 23-19.07.15 11am – 7pm
Friday, 24.07.15 10am – 2pm; Saturday – closed
At the heart of the exhibition, on the first floor, resonates 9 Beet Stretch by Scandinavian sound artist Leif Inge, stretching Beethoven’s 9th symphony over a duration of 24 hours. This stretch is revealing a fresh perspective of notoriously known elements within the masterpiece – melodic, harmonic, textural – while at the same time unfolds an audio sensation that introduces the sounds of a new established creation standing on its own. Another large scale creation is played over the gallery’s staircase and the second floor – consciously leaking into the surrounding spaces and works – is John Cage’s – Diary: How to improve the world (you will only make matters worse). Recorded in Switzerland a little over a year before his death, Cage describes Diary as “a mosaic of ideas, statements, words and stories. It is also a diary. For each day, I determined by chance operations how many parts of the mosaic I would write and how many words there would be in each. The number of words per day was to equal, or by the last statement written, to exceed one hundred words.” Also on the second floor, video works by Johannes Kreidler, a leading representative of “The New Conceptuality in Music” movement, and the Danish composer and artist Simon Steen-Andersen, as well as a selection of remixes by Austrian musician & composer Uli Fussenegger – all three offering different methods of individual expression that strongly corresponds to the act of performance while at the same time detaches from it into mediums excluding the live mechanical action of music. The roof floor is solely dedicated to the works of Amnon Wolman, Israeli sound artist, who will exhibit a new work specially created for the exhibition and the gallery space, alongside an assembly of past creations.
Each year since the inception of the Tzlil Meudcan Festival for Contemporary Music in 2008, there has been a focus on an individual composer and the aesthetics presented within the compositions. The goal was to establish a series of concert programs around an individual compositional aesthetic, in an effort to present a possible analogue to current practices in contemporary music. At the same time, this approach served to introduce the local audience to works and composers of great significance whose names and music, which, for the most part, had never been heard in this region. The 2015 edition of the festival devotes itself to “islands” – a collection of non-conformists “islands” help us to exemplify individuality as a theme for this edition titled “Islands in the Stream”.
The summer of 2014 remains in the minds of many citizens both nationally and internationally, as well in the minds of local and foreign musicians and artists taking part in the 2014 Tzlil Meudcan edition. The sounds of war sirens being heard in the concert hall and the reality of men, women & children being held captive to death and destruction by horrific choices of leaders reminded us all how sadly insignificant can the (singular) opposing voice be while the motor tanks are roaring. Whether in a democracy or not, it seems “a (different) voice/sound” can maybe be heard but it is unfortunately impotent. As so a personal choice to withdraw into an “island” of one’s own thoughts/actions might be favored while at the same time it enhances a given state of limbo, or actually deepen the stalemate of the status quo.
In the fields of art, this conscious choice of becoming an island, or voting for introvert singularity while rejecting the common thinking is more often to succeed in having an impact – larger than the actual size of the singular voice – for transcending alternatives to the institutions one has voted to swim opposite of: giving new and original directions or paths of solutions to issues, and even more importantly, offer new Whether the goals of diversity and pluralism lead us to an alternative away from the conformism of the status-quo or not, being an “island” seems at the moment to be a worthy consideration.
John Cage (1912 – 1992) is doubtless one of the most inventive composers of the twentieth century and the most determined in the pursuit of his musical goals. Though not responsible for its invention – for that we have Henry Cowell to thank – it was Cage’s sophisticated use of the Prepared Piano that first brought him fame. In addition, he was responsible for a number of innovations in the aesthetics of music that were as radical as they were influential: the emancipation of noise and the use of silence as an equal partner to the musical material, the introduction of chance processes in composition, the liberation of sounds from any association with history or intention, and not least doing away with the borders of the musical work by introducing other arts. In doing so Cage’s declared goal was to reconcile art and life.
Uli Fussenegger (born in 1966) has been performing – both as soloist and ensemble player – at the most important festivals all over the world for more than 25 years. He is also a member of Klangforum Wien. Many works for double bass solo have been written for him and were premièred by him. Besides he has also been engaged in free improvisation, played double-bass, e-bass and laptop in formations like Printer, Vienna Loop Orchestra and Tricorder and collaborated with musicians and artists like Franz Koglmann, Eugene Chadburne, Jim O’Rourke, La Monte Young, Peter Böhm, Kronos Quartet, Arditti Quartet, Gidon Kremer, Christoph Marthaler, Sophie Rois and many leading contemporary composers. Uli Fussenegger has participated in countless CD-recordings – as musician, composer, recording manager, sound editor and producer. He is also founder and manager of the CD-label Durian Records. In addition to that he had held the position of programming dramatic advisor of Klangforum Wien for more than ten years, also developing various projects for the ensemble. Uli Fussenegger is teaching both at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt and at the impuls-Academy in Graz. Since 2008 he is also teaching double bass and New Music at the University of Music in Luzern and at Kunstuniversität Graz.
Leif Inge (b. 1970) is a Scandinavian idea-based artist, and his take on Beethoven, the monumental day long soundscape «9 Beet Stretch», has become emblematic of his art. Often he starts from the common, or the iconic, and reworks this to some new uncommon, or un-iconic, state. The familiar made unfamiliar.Leif Inge frequently works solo and in collaboration across fields. He has shown at various venues for visual art, sonic art, new media, film and performance. His work has been shown globally in venues like Vector, Toronto; Nuit Blanche, Toronto; AV Festival, Newcastle; NIMK (Netherlands Media Art Institute), Amsterdam; Impakt Festival, Utrecht; The Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Numerica (European Center for Digital Arts), Montbéliard; Wien Modern, Wien; Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn; Issue Project Room, New York; BizArt Art Center, Shanghai; Diapason Gallery, New York; Centro Nacional de las Artes, México. Recent work has been featured in Gramophone, MusicWorks, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.
Johannes Kreidler (b. 1980) studied from 2000 to 2006 composition, electronic music and music theory at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg and at the Koninklijk Conservatorium The Hague, among others with Mathias Spahlinger and Orm Finnendahl. Kreidler’s works have been featured at numerous international music festivals, including the Donaueschingen and Darmstadt festivals, Ultima Festival Oslo, Musica Strasbourg, Gaudeamus Music Week and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. In 2012, he was awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis of the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. Currently he is teaching composition and music theory at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. In 2012, his book “Musik mit Musik”, a collection of essays was released at Wolke Publishing House.
Simon Steen-Andersen (b.1976) is a Berlin-based composer, performer and installation artist, working in the field between instrumental music, electronics, video and performance. His works from recent years integrate concrete elements in the music and emphasizing the physical and choreographic aspects of instrumental performance. The works often include amplified acoustic instruments in combination with sampler, video, simple everyday objects or homemade constructions. He studied composition with Karl Aage Rasmussen, Mathias Spahlinger, Gabriel Valverde and Bent Sørensen in Aarhus. Steen-Andersen’s music has been performed by world leading ensemble at most accmoplished new music festivals. For his works he received numerous prizes and grants – latest the Nordic Council Music Prize and the SWR Orchestra Prize 2014, the Carl Nielsen Prize (DK) and the Kunstpreis Musik from Akademie der Künste in Berlin 2013, the International Rostrum of Composers, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm Residency 2010 and the Kranichsteiner Music Award 2008.
Amnon Wolman (b. 1955) is a sound artist, a composer and a composition teacher whose work is presented by various soloists, performance organizations, galleries, and museums. He taught at Northwestern University, Harvard University, at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and is currently on the faculty of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Publications of some of his audio and text works are available commercially and on the web. He lives with his partner Eyal Levinson in Kfar Vradim
