The Baker Museum presents In Tangible Noise
Panel discussion on sound and art
Xenia Benivolski, curator, art critic and writer Christoph Cox, Dean and Professor of Philosophy and the Sonic Arts at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Modern Art at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Alexandra T. Vasquez, Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at Yale University
For over three decades, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has integrated art, science, architecture and technology into his trailblazing artistic practice. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Obra Sonora includes monumental works such as Atmosphonia, a sound and light environment featuring 3,000 audio channels playing back natural field recordings; Volute 2, a speech bubble presented as an oversized aluminum sculpture; and Sphere Packing: Bach, a 10-foot diameter sphere that supports 1,128 loudspeakers—each playing a different composition by Johann Sebastian Bach. This will be the first museum exhibition to explore Lozano-Hemmer’s use of sound as a medium of expression and image-making.
Join scholars and curators Xenia Benivolski, Christoph Cox, Rudolf Frieling and Alexandra T. Vasquez in a discussion about the forms and cultures of artistic expression that explores sound as its primary medium and subject.
All exhibition lecture tickets include same-day admission to The Baker Museum.
Xenia Benivolski
Xenia Benivolski
Xenia Benivolski is a curator, writer and educator focused on the politics of acoustic spaces and how sound and music reveal social, political, and historical structures. She co-founded the collective 8eleven project gallery (2013-18), curating over 50 exhibitions. From 2018 to 2020, she developed the temporary institution SUGAR, curating the exhibition and lecture series Pickle Politics and publishing Shapeshift. She produced Zanis Waldheims’ first posthumous institutional solo exhibition at the University of Toronto in 2020. Since 2022, Benivolski has organized the You Can’t Trust Music program on e-flux.com and co-directed a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. She regularly publishes essays and contributes to Frieze, Texte Zur Kunst, the U.K.’s The Wire and e-flux. Benivolski teaches at OCAD University, York University and the University of Toronto. She is a research affiliate at Lakehead University and a Ph.D. student at LUCA School of Art in Brussels.
Christoph Cox
Christoph Cox
A philosopher, art theorist and curator of visual and sonic art, Christoph Cox is dean of Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and professor of culture and media at The New School. He is the author of Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (University of California Press, 1999) and co-editor of Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg, 2015) and Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Bloomsbury, 2017; Continuum, 2004). The recipient of an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, Cox is editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine. His writing has appeared in October, Artforum, Journal of the History of Philosophy, The Wire, Journal of Visual Culture, Organised Sound, The Review of Metaphysics and elsewhere. Cox has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Kitchen, The Artist’s Institute, CONTEXT Art Miami, New Langton Arts, G Fine Art Gallery and other venues.
Rudolf Frieling
Rudolf Frieling
Rudolf Frieling has worked as curator, educator and publisher in the field of art and media since 1989. In 2006, he was appointed curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where he has curated over 25 exhibitions among them major survey shows such as The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now(2008-09) and Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media (2012). He co-curated Soundtracks (2017) and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Unstable Presence (2018-21) as well as the retrospectives Bruce Conner: It’s All True (2016-17), Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here (2019), Nam June Paik (2019-21) and, most recently, the collection presentation What Matters (2023-24). Prior to his tenure at SFMOMA, Frieling worked at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, as a curator and researcher from 1994 to 2006. Currently, he also serves as the artistic co-director of the online platform Media Art in the 21st Century.
Alexandra T. Vasquez
Alexandra T. Vasquez
Alexandra T. Vazquez is professor of theater, dance and performance studies at Yale University. She is the author of The Florida Room (Duke University Press, 2022), chosen by Pitchfork as one of the best books of 2022. Her previous book, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke University Press 2013), won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Prize in 2014. Her work has been featured in such journals as Small Axe, American Quarterly, Social Text, Women & Performance and the Journal of Popular Music Studies as well as in the edited volumes Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, Keywords for Latina/o Studies, Reggaeton, The Tide Was Always High and Pop When the World Falls Apart. You can also find her writing on the great Celia Cruz on NPR’s Turning the Tables series. Vazquez is a proud graduate of the New World School of the Arts high school in Miami, Florida.
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