Artist Zimoun Art Installation @ Figge Art Museum, Davenport

Zimoun 

Art Installation 

Figge Art Museum, Davenport 

September 23, 2023 - February 4, 2024 

Renowned Swiss artist ZIMOUN transforms the Figge Art Museum’s third-floor gallery into a mesmerizing realm of moving cardboard towers accompanied by an orchestra of captivating sounds. Visitors are able to walk amid the animated columns and experience the evocative sounds generated through friction, vibration, and resonance.

The installation incorporates over eighty towering stacks of cardboard, each reaching a staggering height of 16 feet. What makes this exhibition truly extraordinary is that each of these cardboard columns are set in motion mechanically, creating a dynamic visual and auditory experience. As visitors explore the space, they will encounter a symphony of sounds, including scratching, scraping, rubbing, and clicking, filling the entire gallery.

This installation challenges our boundaries of perception. Using cardboard boxes, Zimoun crafts an environment where sound and sight playfully interact. As visitors walk around the gallery, a myriad of rhythms and auditory illusions unfold, prompting visitors to think about what it is that they hear. Is it merely chaos? Or does it sound like falling rain before transforming into a procession of rail cars? Every visit to the installation promises a unique experience as the sounds, motion, and orientation of the boxes within the towers change. What you see is what you hear in this dynamic installation.

The distinctiveness of Zimoun’s work lies in its simplicity of construction and the complexity of the soundscape it produces. Despite its intricate mechanics, Zimoun’s installation is environmentally conscious. It uses minimal electricity and features components designed for reusability and recyclability and generates little to no waste during construction and operation. It is a testament to the artist’s commitment to sustainable art practices.

ZIMOUN lives and works in Bern, Switzerland and has exhibited his work internationally in institutions, including the Museum Haus Konstruktiv Zurich, Museum of Contemporary Art MAC Santiago de Chile, and Kunstmuseum Bern, to name a few. His innovative approach to combining visual and auditory elements has garnered acclaim from both art enthusiasts and engineers alike. In addition to his installation compositions, Zimoun is known for creating purely sound works that explore microscopic sounds and noises. These recordings are often designed for multi-channel sound systems, immersing listeners in three-dimensional auditory experiences.

FIGGE ART MUSEUM

225 West Second Street, Davenport, Iowa

www.figgeartmuseum.org 

Live art sound performances at Raven Row, London, June-July 2011

Gone with the Wind 

Live Art Sound Performances 

Raven Row, London 

June & July 2011 

Photo of ESTHER FERRER - Unesco Paris - CourtesyRaven Row, London 

In conjunction with the sound art exhibition Gone with the Wind, Raven Row presents a programme of seven sound based performances through June and July 2011. Including established artists such as Esther Ferrer, the programme will also comprise presentations from the burgeoning experimental music and sound art scene selected by Ed Baxter, exhibition curator and director of art radio station Resonance104.4fm. 

Esther Ferrer 

Saturday 25 June, 7pm

Artist Esther Ferrer (b. 1937, Spain), is best known for her radical performances, her principal form of artistic expression since 1965, both as a soloist and as a member of pioneering experimental music and performance art group ZAJ (1959-93). Alongside composers Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti, Ferrer participated in the group's ‘visible music’ actions and extended concerts. Known as a proponent of free expression, confrontation, feminism and authentic experience, Ferrer will present an entirely new performance piece in Raven Row’s gallery space.

Saturday 2 July, 2pm

The Bonham Brothers are two London based brothers and noise musicians known for making music by playing bric-a-brac as instruments. A burnt tape machine found during the recent restoration of Raven Row has been made into a sculpture by artist Richard Crow for the Resonance Open. Crow and the Bonham Brothers will resurrect the destroyed machine as an instrument for this performance. 

Thursday 7 July, 7pm

The Resonance Radio Orchestra will perform the newly composed Lascia o raddoppia? [Double or quits?], a radiophonic reconstruction of the 1950s Italian television quiz show of the same name. One of the winners of this hugely popular show was Walter Marchetti, an artist in the current exhibition Gone with the Wind, who as a teenager answered questions on contemporary music. Another contestant was quintessential avant-garde composer John Cage, answering questions about his specialist subject of mushrooms.

Saturday 9 July, 2pm

Alongside a sixteen strong choir, Israeli singer and experimental musician Sharon Gal will perform The Long Drone. Acoustic instruments and multiple voices will ‘drone’ for two hours in a style pitched somewhere between natural soundscapes, La Monte Young's The Theatre of Eternal Music and The Scratch Orchestra.

Sunday 10 July, 2pm

Sound artists and theorists Lucia Farinati and Brandon LaBelle will discuss the newly published Site of Sound, a book that considers radio as a sonic architecture. Sound researcher Ian Rawes will join them to introduce a discussion about field recording and phonography.

Saturday 16 July, 2pm

British artist Christopher Weaver will perform Variations for a Room and a Tone, an installation that will make audible the resonant frequencies of Raven Row to produce music. Weaver will be joined by the members of the electro-acoustic quartet Oscillatorial Binnage.

Sunday 17 July, 2pm

Radio artists Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann form the Anglo-German duo Tonic Train who will give a performance combining radio feedback and wine. Having recently moved to the Mosel region of Germany, in the heart of the country's wine growing area, Tonic Train will combine their new found passion for vinification with a lifelong saturation in avant-garde sonic arts.

All events are free and places will be allocated on a first come first served basis. Reservation needed for Esther Ferrer event.

RAVEN ROW, LONDON, UK

www.ravenrow.org

Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi, Walter Marchetti, Resonance104.4fm - Pioneers of sound art exhibition at Raven Row, London

Exhibition: Gone with the Wind 
Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi, Walter Marchetti, Resonance104.4fm  
Raven Row, London 
Through 17 July 2011 

RAVEN ROW LONDON

This exhibition brings together three pioneers of sound art, Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi and Walter Marchetti. Each artist has developed a distinct approach to the problem of representing immateriality, while sharing a lightness of touch, approaching sound with patience, restraint and fidelity. As well as presenting new and historic work, the exhibition comprise live performance, and a selection of material from the artists' substantial archives.

MAX EASTLEY (born 1944, UK) is an artist and musician whose sound sculptures play on a balance between the natural environment and human intervention. His musical collaborations include the 1975 album New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments with David Toop, produced by Brian Eno. His response to the interior of Raven Row is a meditation on the 18th century Picturesque, achieved with 21st century technology and a ‘Bergsonian’ approach to time. 

TAKEHISA KOSUGI (born 1938, Japan) is a major figure in modernist sound art. In the early 1960s his event pieces were realised by Fluxus in Europe and the USA. Kosugi pioneered the development of Japanese experimental music with Group ONGAKU and the Taj Mahal Travellers. Since 1977 he has been a composer/performer at Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and became its Music Director in 1995. As well as archival material, Takehisa Kosugi will present a number of works including the sound installation Mano-Dharma, electronic, 1967/2011.

WALTER MARCHETTI (born 1931, Italy) was a founder member of ZAJ, a recalcitrant Mediterranean parallel to Fluxus, which in the 1960s produced action-music-performances, anarchic gags, and elegant assaults on the music establishment. Marchetti befriended John Cage in 1958, and went on to collaborate with him on a number of projects. His work has often focused on the grand piano – for more than 50 years he has been preparing them like a chef intent on marinating sound. Two of Walter Marchetti's pianos, alongside works from Emanuele Carcano's Collection, are exhibited. 

WALTER MARCHETTI

Walter Marchetti, Musica da camera n. 182

Milano, Pianofortissimo, 

Fondazione Mudima, January 1990. 

Photograph by Fabrizio Garghetti 

Courtesy of Raven Row, London

Alongside these positions, RESONANCE104.4FM is installed at Raven Row for the duration of the exhibition, broadcasting, and hosting workshops and live events, as well as presenting an 'overhung' sound installation – the Resonance Open – with contributions solicited from local and international sound artists. Resonance104.4fm is the world’s first radio art station, established by London Musicians’ Collective, it started broadcasting on May 1st 2002. Its brief is to provide a radical alternative to the universal formulae of mainstream broadcasting.

The exhibition is curated by ED BAXTER, director of Resonance104.4fm.

RAVEN ROW, LONDON, UK
56 Artillery Lane
London E1 7LS

www.ravenrow.org

Resonance104.4fm website: www.resonancefm.com