What You Will Watch and Hear
Musarc | Amina Abbas-Nazari, Jenna Sutela
Lisson Gallery, London
2 June 2023
Lisson presents an evening of performance with Musarc, one of the UK’s most progressive choral collectives, programmed in dialogue with the group exhibition, Matter as Actor.
The performance responds to the exhibition’s investigations into material inter-relationships as active agents in the complex entanglements of humans and the more-than-human world. The scores selected for this event were first performed by Musarc as part of Odrathek, a weekend of experimental performance at an old fire station in Lambeth in 2017, which brought together artists from the UK and abroad to ask, how do we make music in the Chthulucene?
In the galleries, Musarc performed a score by Jenna Sutela entitled O M A I G S T R N, where the artist translates life strategies deployed by slime mould into components and instructions for a vocal performance.
In the gallery’s sculpture courtyard, the ensemble performed What You Will Watch and Hear, a score by Amina Abbas-Nazari. The piece sets singers and the audience hurtling along concentric trajectories around a rustling bamboo sun in a collective meditation on how to interpret climatic events that are so complex and massively distributed across space and time that they are beyond the grasp and understanding of the individual. Musarc and the audience come together to form different constituents of the ‘Whole’ (much as a choir does), each performing and embodying a different perspective on which to watch and hear in the same event.
Images: photos by Yiannis Katsaris, courtesy of Lisson Gallery.
