Evening of performance at Lisson Gallery for London Gallery Weekend 2023
18 April 2023
Friday 2 June, 6–8pm
What You Will Watch and Hear
MUSARC | AMINA ABBAS-NAZARI | JENNA SUTELA
RSVP via London Gallery Weekend
Lisson Gallery is delighted to once again participate in London Gallery Weekend (LGW), taking place from 2–4 June across the city. To coincide with LGW's Central & West London galleries focus on Friday 2 June, Lisson presents an evening of performance with Musarc, one of the UK’s most progressive choral collectives, programmed with the group exhibition, Matter as Actor.
The event 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 will perform 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. Sutela’s work with slime mould is grouped into an ongoing project called ‘Orgs—Organization, Organism, Orgasm’. In performances, she constructs patterns, pathways and ‘many-headed’ readings from the letters in these words and the anagrams they can form. Although slime is absent as material, it is present as method, or reference, inspiring phase-shifting, decentralised speech, improvisation and feedback loops.
In the gallery’s sculpture courtyard at 27 Bell Street, the ensemble will perform 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.
Event schedule:
27 Bell Street, London, NW1 5BY
6 – 7pm: Singers perform Jenna Sutela's score O M A I G S T R N Intermittently across Lisson Gallery’s spaces
7:30pm: Full choir performance of Amima Abbas-Nazari's score, What you will Watch and Hear in the gallery’s outdoor courtyard at 27 Bell Street
Image: Musarc and Angela Wai-Nok Hui performing Wood Sectional at Architectur on Stage, Barbican, London, January 2023. Photo: Matthew Blunderfield
