On
Saturday April 20, 2013 Townhouse Gallery presents, in its First Floor Space,
“How do you translate a text that is not a text? How do you perform a score that is not a score?” — a seven-hour performance orchestrated by the Berlin and Los Angeles-based artist
Warren Neidich. The event will start at 2:00 PM with the performance of Michelle Rounds.
During his month-long residency at Townhouse, the artist has been making a series of graphic, abstract musical scores that use images instead of notes, based on found newspaper articles and images. This material forms a fragmented archive of the recent political events occurring in Cairo. The material is then transferred upon musical staffs with scotch tape producing a paradoxical and hybrid drawing/score.
The staffs are armatures upon which disjointed texts, images and colors are activated. Twenty-two Cairo-based musicians (spanning from classical oud and tabla players to electronic sound artists) will be invited to the First Floor Gallery to read and react to these word-shattering images and texts in an improvisational manner, leading to similarly abstracted, experimental live performances. This experiment is intended to free the individual musical performances from the formal language of written notational music, and in so doing, suggest broader possibilities for a generalized politically emancipated communication.
Participating performers: Hashem Aly, Yvonne Buchheim, Bahaa El-Ansary, Omar El-Deeb, Ahmed Safi El Din, Mahmoud El Saghir, Nadah El Shazly, Shahir Eschander, Mohamed Abdelfattah Ibrahim, Ashiq Khondker Wael Leheta, Ayman Mabrouk, Adam Miller, Amr Mohamed, Koen Nutters, Mohamed Refaat, Michelle Rounds, Alaa Hussein Saber, Ibrahim Salah, Hassam Shehata, Nadah El Shazly, Mahmoud Tarik, Esam Abdelhamid, John Verlenden, Robert Williams, Hassan Zaky, Khaled Kaddal, Ayman Asfour.
Warren Neidich is a post-Conceptual artist based in Berlin and Los Angeles. Art before Philosophy not After. Currently his practice has been directed towards noise compositions as neurobiological modifiers. Recent awards include The Fulbright Specialist Program, Fine Arts Category, University of Cairo, 2013 and The Murray and Vickie Pepper Distinguished Visiting Artist and Scholar Award, Pitzer College, 2012.
Selected exhibitions include The Whitney Museum of Art, New York City, P.S.1, MOMA, Long Island City, Ludwig Museum, Koln, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Haus de Kulteren der Welt, Berlin and the MAK, Vienna.
For more information and updates please visit the facebook page of the event: https://www.facebook.com/events/431543463607455/
Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art
10 Nabrawy Street off Champollion Street, Downtown - Cairo Tel: +20 2 2576 8086
