@ {SUITE} GALLERY

Serj Tankian

Grammy Award winning Armenian American musician, artist and activist Serj Tankian will be exhibiting at {Suite} Gallery in Auckland and Wellington in February 2023.

Mounted across both galleries, this solo exhibition titled ‘Kiwi in Pangea’ will include a selection of paintings, each accompanied by a musical score composed by Tankian that is as integral to the work as the paint itself.

The exhibition is scheduled to open at {Suite} Ponsonby (189 Ponsonby Road, Auckland), on the evening of 2 February, 5 - 7 pm. Two days later, {Suite} Wellington (241 Cuba Street, Te Aro) will hold an afternoon opening on 4 February, 1 - 4 pm. Tankian will be in attendance at both openings. These events are free and open to the public; visitors are welcome to join the artist at the gallery for refreshments and previews of the exhibition.

Tankian stepped onto the art scene in 2013 with his project Disarming Time Paintings and has been exhibiting across the United States and Aotearoa since. His works synthesise auditory and optical mediums to create multi-sensory paintings which challenge traditional conventions of visual art.

The artist explains, "The urge came to me in the discovery that music has become so temporal and devalued in the world today, so I wanted to create an exclusive experience... something unique for someone to hold, so they become the only person to experience this. I'm aiming to have people SEE the music and HEAR the art. Using a modern app, we're able to take Kandinsky's Synesthesia to a whole new level.”

The musical compositions complementing each work can be accessed by visitors in the gallery by scanning the paintings with Arloopa, a free application for iOS and Android devices. This utilisation of smartphone technology to realise the intertwined relationship between music and art in the gallery setting is the first of its kind.