A LARGE INSCRIPTION, A GREAT NOISEADAM BASANTA
The Museum as Performance
Installation
A LARGE INSCRIPTION, A GREAT NOISE (2019)
"A Large Inscription, A Great Noise" investigates notions of historical time and time-keeping, cycles of construction and destruction in an era of mass communication, automization through mechanical kineticism, and the modalities of its resulting trace.
In ""A Large Inscription"", a microphone stand is dragged over a field of gravel; an indispensable instrument of the modern demagogue is knocked over like an overrun statue. Rotating slowly, it leaves behind an evolving elegant trace with no beginning or end.
In contrast to this continuous gesture, "A Great Noise" punctuates the passage of time with a Sisyphean physicality: a microphone encased in a cement block is lifted and dropped, slamming against a larger base. Like mechanically-operated durational performance art, the visceral force evokes tension of the microphone’s inevitable fate, whether that means succumbing to a violent end or breaking free of its shackles.
Presented with the support of Canada Council for the Arts.
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Adam Basanta (b.1985, Tel Aviv) lives and works in Montreal. He holds a BFA in Music composition from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver BC CAN) and an interdisciplinary Research-Creation MA in Fine Arts (Concordia University, Montreal QC CAN)
Basanta’s work has been exhibited in various international galleries and institutions, such as Carrol / Fletcher Gallery, London, UK; Fotomuseum Winterthur; National Art Centre Tokyo; American Medium Gallery, New York; New Media Gallery, New Westminster; Moscow Biennale for Young Art; Serralves Museum, Porto; Edith- Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg; and The Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe. Basanta has been awarded several international prizes, including the Japan Media Arts Prize (2016), the Aesthetica Art Prize (2017) and Prix Pierre Ayot (2019).
As an experimental composer and performer, his concert music, live performances, and sound recordings are presented worldwide, including appearances in events such as the MATA Festival (NYC), Gaudeamus Musicweek (NL), CTM Festival (GER), Akousma Festival (CAN), and Mutek Festival (CAN).
My work investigates technology - a continuous spectrum spanning from mud-brick to machine learning - as a meeting point of concurrent, overlapping systems; a nexus of cultural, computational, biological, and economic forces. In uncovering, augmenting, and creating systems of entanglement, I am trying to uncover a sense of “liveness” or dynamism resulting from the unpredictable performances of various actants pulling independently in collective balance. The works are visual, but equally, choreographic and performative.
Through a variety of media - installation, kinetic sculpture, sound, and computational image-making - I often employ commercial technological readymades as a core vocabulary, displacing them into an artistic context. Placing technological processes and artifacts in unconventional and absurd relationships to one another, I aim to create a fissure in their normative functions, reflecting on their roles as contemporary prosthetics with which we co-exist in a hybrid ecology.
My research and creation processes involve a balance of qualitative and quantitative approaches. I am particularly interested in the interplay between the two seemingly polar-opposite, binary viewpoints, and strive towards a cross-pollination in which one feeds and complicates the other, and vice versa.
— Adam Basanta