Polyphonic: polyphony in image and sound
Vincent Meessen presents his installation One.Two.Three in a group exhibition centred around the diversity of voices and the effect of pluralistic sounds at Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Gera (D)
01/07 – 19/09/2021
Taking place in the twin cities of Gera and Saint Denis, museums in both cities are jointly developing and presenting an exhibition which addresses polyphony from both an arts and music perspective. The exhibition encourages visitors to reflect on the multiplicity of voices as a societal phenomenon. The installations, performances, drawings and videos highlight the clashing convergence and divergence of voices and sounds in different ways.
The exhibition will kick off with a public conference at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) which will address the topic of polyphony as a theoretical model and artistic medium. The Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris will accompany the entire project with a conceptual and theoretical series of seminars. An extensive publication will document the exhibition and accompanying programme.
In One.Two.Three, Vincent Meessen begins by circumventing the trap of Situationist mythology, in which Guy Debord has been consecrated as the hero and epicentre of a revolution. Instead, the work revisits a part of the history of this movement which to this day has been ignored. The starting point for the work is the discovery of the lyrics to a protest song that Congolese Situationist Joseph Mbelolo Ya Mpiku, composed in May 1968, in the archives of the Belgian Situationist Raoul Vaneigem. Working with Mbelolo and young musicians in Kinshasa, Vincent Meessen has produced a new rendition of the song. The fragmented cinematographic display of the work offers a spatial translation of this collective arrangement of subjectivities.
This presentation of One.Two.Three is on loan from the Flemish Community.
Artistic director: Anne Zeitz in collaboration with Claudia Tittel
Curator: Anne Zeitz
Artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Félicia Atkinson, Oliver Beer, Candice Breitz, Carlfriedrich Claus, Kazumichi Fujiwara, institute for incongruous translation (Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Ashkan Sepahvand), Rolf Julius, Christina Kubisch, Olaf Nicolai, Vincent Meessen, Francisco Meirino, Ari Benjamin Meyers, Rie Nakajima, Max Neuhaus, Olaf Nicolai, Ute Pleuger, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Matthieu Saladin, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Lerato Shadi, Dennis Tyfus, Jorinde Voigt, Euridice Zaituna Kala