Proximity Music is a joint exhibition program initiated in 2021 by iii and Rewire, which seeks to connect music, architecture, technology, ritual, and play through physical experiences engaging with all the senses.
April 7-9 2023, The Hague, Amare and surroundings, 12:00 - 20:00 daily, free access
Proximity Music: Visceral Acts is an exhibition inviting us to engage playfully with mind and body. Presenting a diverse range of works emerging from the backdrop of a health crisis, it brings into question ideas of health and sanity. Through the lens of personal, creative if not unorthodox approaches, artists help us trace paths backwards and forwards in time, connecting with different forms of knowledge. When old habits become inadequate to deal with an era of instability, what can we learn from the creative practices of artists, which can aid us in the search for a new equilibrium?
Featuring: Aernoudt Jacobs, Alexis Bellavance, Amos Peled, Diane Mahín, Dominik ‘t Jolle & Maria Komarova, Frederique Pisuisse, Jeroen Alexander Meijer, Karel van Laere, Matteo Marangoni & Dieter Vandoren, Naama Tsabar, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Vica Pacheco, Vivian Caccuri & Thiago Lanis.
In Proximity Music: Visceral Acts, artists play with materials, technologies and rituals associated with health and healing. While advancements in the medical world have made it possible to cure better than ever, its treatments have become increasingly scary to us. At the same time, as medical science progresses, ancient knowledge and practices are lost. As a result, we have become either fearful or disconnected from the process of healing itself. The therapeutic use of art and music goes back millennia, with many practices still lively as alternative medicine. Rather than having the ambition to cure, this exhibition reflects on our relation to health and the power of art, music and ritual to transform our consciousness. It presents works by artists who share their own creative perspectives, taking visitors on a journey connecting modern medical practices with traditional rituals, and joining them to propose completely imaginary new scenarios.
The interior of the body, and the tools to reach into it, are explored in the works of Amos Peled, hacking into an ultrasonic medical device to perform with the sounds and images intended for diagnostic purposes, and Diane Mahín, using the traditional stethoscope of the family doctor to compose a theatrical dramaturgy staging a conflict between conscious reason and gut feeling. Surgical tools take the stage in Karel van Laere’s audiovisual performance exposing the gestures and instruments used to operate within the human body. The stethoscope is also at the centre of the work by Aernoudt Jacobs, in which the architectural glass skin of the exhibition venue becomes a body to be explored inside out.
The non-human as source of both contagion and evolutionary transformation and resilience is addressed in Vivian Caccuri and Thiago Lanis’ performance attempting to become one with the sonic environment of the tropical jungle as a site of exuberant life, but also long associated in western consciousness with death and disease, as well as in Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s DIY punk music video in which marginalised vermin and humans learn to co-evolve in an toxic landscape in Central America. A swarm of sonic creatures creates an ecosystem questioning the boundaries of nature and technology and offering a delicate space of contemplation in the work of Matteo Marangoni and Dieter Vandoren. The regenerative effect of bodies of water on the onlooker is captured in Alexis Bellavance’s optical journey exploring The Hague’s canals.
Music, theatre and ritual and the ancestral connection between art and healing come to the fore in the works of: Vica Pacheco, whose audiovisual alchemy leaps into a dance of bodies playing a collection of digitally reinvented, pre-columbian ceramic whistling water vessels connected to ancient fertility rites; Frederique Pisuisse, whose ficto-memoir about her teenage relationship with an older man is catalysed by a sort of blood letting therapy in which snails take the place of leeches; Jeroen Alexander Meijer, whose large scale audiovisual environment developed in response to ADHD invites visitors to slow down and regenerate their capacity for attention; Dominik ‘t Jolle & Maria Komarova’s immersive installation conveying the auditory hallucinations of tinnitus, and Naama Tsabar whose choir sings of body pain, healing and homecoming around a monumental white flag outside The Hague’s City Hall.
Proximity Music: Visceral Acts is presented by iii and Rewire in collaboration with Amare and with the financial support of the Creative Industries Fund NL, Mondriaan Fund, the Municipality of The Hague, Stroom Den Haag, Creative Europe and Nieuwe Instituut.