Proximity Music: Visceral Acts

Proximity Music: Visceral Acts is an exhibition inviting us to engage playfully with mind and body. Presenting a diverse range of works emerging from the backdrop of a health crisis, it brings into question ideas of health and sanity. Through the lens of personal, creative if not unorthodox approaches, artists help us trace paths backwards and forwards in time, connecting with different forms of knowledge. When old habits become inadequate to deal with an era of instability, what can we learn from the creative practices of artists, which can aid us in the search for a new equilibrium?

In Proximity Music: Visceral Acts, artists play with materials, technologies and rituals associated with health and healing. The therapeutic use of art and music goes back millennia, with many practices still lively as alternative medicine. Rather than having the ambition to cure, this exhibition reflects on our relation to health and the power of art, music and ritual to transform our consciousness.

Aernoudt Jacobs Glass Vibration Gaze

The site-specific work Glass Vibration Gaze (2023), by Belgian artist Aernoudt Jacobs transforms window panes into an installation that merges architecture and music. Electronically generated musical patterns are induced into the windows using audio transducers. Stethoscopes attached to the windows function as microscopic listening devices which allow visitors to eavesdrop on the sonic world inside the glass while observing the flow of city life outside.

Glass Vibration Gaze is commissioned by Rewire in collaboration with iii, The Hague and Amare.

Alexis Bellavance The Raft

The Raft is an optical journey on the canals of The Hague’s neighbourhood of Moerwijk, which captures the regenerative effect of bodies of water on the onlooker. Alexis Bellavance’s video camera guides the viewer’s eye in an exploration of the interface between oscillatory wave phenomena and the cityscape of the periphery. The result is a canvas in which the constructed landscape becomes fluid as sound, a material that Bellavance edits compositionally into a form of visual music. The work takes inspiration from Homer’s Odyssey, referring to the vision of Ulysses on his arrival in the archipelago of the Phaeacians: Scheria, a mysterious land, a parallel and unknown world, which could only be reached in dreams. It connects this myth to the artist’s own visual impairment, which requires Bellavance to wear special lenses in his daily life. In The Raft the water surface becomes an alternative lens to connect to reality.

The Raft was produced during a residency at iii as part of an exchange program with perte de signal in Montreal.

Amos Peled Phantom Limb

Phantom Limb (2023) is a project by multidisciplinary artist Amos Peled, exploring the enigmatic and poetic relationship between a human being and the black box that is their interior through the use of a medical ultrasound machine. Amos Peled has been developing methods to perform audio-visual manipulations which transform the ultrasound machine into an instrument that illuminates the inside of the body and expands the space of the artistic act into the organs, under the skin. The work investigates conceptions such as the distance of the human body from the self, the hierarchical relationship between the inside and the outside, pain as a poetic message, and the lack of internal symmetry.

Diane Mahín

GUT

GUT is the title of Diane Mahín’s ongoing practice-based artistic research project. Through this theatrical thought experiment, the Dutch-Iranian performance maker and sociologist questions how humans behave when their bodies are turned inside out. Mahín approaches this question by presenting different performative worlds in which the sounds of the guts of the performers are amplified. The gut-human’s thoughts, actions, communications, movements, and feelings, are all determined by their gut sounds. During Proximity Music: Visceral Acts one gut-human, Manuel Groothuysen, will inhabit the artist-run gallery Trixie. Visitors are invited to walk in and out of the durational performance and experience the work both from outside via the street windows and inside the gallery.

GUT is presented by iii and Rewire in collaboration with Trixie.

Dominik ’t Jolle & Maria Komarova

Tinnere. Behind the Tune

Dominik ‘t Jolle has been suffering from ringing in her ears and sound hallucinations for much of her life. Already as a child she observed vibrations and flashes of light with realistic resonances in the room where she was. She woke up one morning with a deafening, high sine tone that never stopped. Tinnere. Behind the Tune (2020), originates from her wish to translate into an audiovisual artwork and share with others these auditory hallucinations, a process in which she has collaborated with artist Maria Komarova and Jan Ost from BRAI3N, Ghent, a multidisciplinary centre for brain research.

Tinnere. Behind the Tune was co-produced by Overtoon, BRAI3N, and STUK.

Frederique Pisuisse I’m Just Lying There

I’m Just Lying There is a ficto-memoir about Frederique Pisuisse’s teenage relationship with her first boyfriend who was a 36-yearold man. Through poems and pop songs, the film brings back memories of their grown-up dates: having dinner at a restaurant for the first time without parents, and being picked up from her birthday in his Mercedes. The coming-of-age film looks at the shaping experiences in which the female body is subjected to the male gaze and becomes an object of desire for the first time. The protagonist, who is 14 years old at the time of their affair, is pulled towards the sensual experiences of being with this man, and simultaneously feels the danger in them. Through film, writing, music, and performance, Pisuisse explores the topics of memory and trauma and outof-body experiences.

I’m Just Lying There is distributed by LI-MA.

Jeroen Alexander Meijer Ouroboros

Ouroboros is an immersive, 360 degrees audiovisual instrument by multi-sensory artist Jeroen Alexander Meijer with the ability to envelop without overwhelming. It strikes a balance between obtaining our attention with the attraction of a spectacle while also leaving us enough freedom to explore the sensory space that it creates. With his instrument Meijer guides us through a spatial composition of light and sound, intended to help us gain awareness of the movement of our attention and to aid us in recovering from overstimulation.

Jeroen Alexander Meijer received the iii residency award for 2022 for his graduation work at the Royal Art Academy of The Hague.

Karel van Laere Reach

A recurring theme in Karel van Laere’s work is the antagonism between the human body and technological systems. Between 2021 and 2022 he shifted his gaze to the inside of the body using surgical tools. The vulnerability of the internal body usually shows its beauty in sterile operating rooms where surgeons deftly perform meticulous operations with laparoscopic instruments. Fascinated by its fragility, van Laere explored the inside of the body and the artistic possibilities of laparoscopic instruments in a series of new works which the performance Reach (2023) comes from.

Production: The Grey Space in the Middle and Stichting Largo.

Made possible by: Mathijs van Til, Rijksakademie Amsterdam, the Municipality of The Hague, Stroom Den Haag, Mondriaan Fonds, Amarte Fonds, the In Art We Trust Fund (by We Are Public), Laparoscopyboxx, and FlexDex Surgical.

Matteo Marangoni & Dieter Vandoren

Komorebi

Komorebi (2022) is a swarm of artificial creatures that make music in response to the sun, the clouds, and the shadows of trees moving in the wind. Komorebi is a Japanese word meaning “sunlight shining through trees.” We are invited to experience the shadow play produced by the tree canopy on the forest floor as music. The work suggests that “life” is not an exceptional property of organic life forms, but also a property of complex systems reaching beyond biological life as we understand it.

Komorebi was commissioned by Into the Great Wide Open and produced in partnership with Crossing Parallels and Highlight Festival (TU Delft) with the financial support of the Creative Industries Fund NL and Stichting Stokroos.

Naama Tsabar Untitled (Without) variation 1 & Ruptures (Opus 1)

From a distance, Naama Tsabar’s flag Untitled (Without) is a long piece of fabric with a rectangular cut-out. Where we expect to see a flag, we instead see empty space. With closer inspection, the flag is made of white strips of fabric that are sewn together with coloured stitches. The colours derive from the LGBTQIA+ Progress Pride Flag, an updated version of the iconic LGBT Rainbow Flag. Untitled (Without) suggests that perhaps identity is far more subtle than the bold symbols and objects that attempt to represent us. Tsabar’s installation includes a sonic work titled Ruptures (Opus 1), a live recording of Fielded, Rose Blanshei, and Wolf Weston singing, sighing, groaning, and breathing. Ruptures (Opus 1) explores the female musical voice as a “historically expressive anomaly, a place where a disruption of the patriarchal order happens under the cover of beauty and melody.”

Both works were presented in combination at Ballroom Marfa, Texas, in 2020.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo Sonnet of Vermin & The Vermin’s Radio

In Sonnet of Vermin (2022), a legion of unwanted creatures related to the Mesoamerican underworld attempt to syntonise with each other and the dead in the midst of a planetary cataclysm. They seek for a subaltern solidarity and queer relationality as a form of re-existence within the ruins. Sonnet of Vermin was presented at the Mexican pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2022. In The Vermin’s Radio (2023) created during her residency at iii, The Hague in 2023 the characters of Sonnet of Vermin are further explored as interactive wearable sculptures populating the exhibition space.

Vica Pacheco Mitote & Ollin

Vica Pacheco seeks to create a dialogue between animism, ritual, and technology in her series of works Animacy. Revolving around the whistling vessel, a hydraulic sound instrument that existed in pre-Columbian times throughout Mesoamerica, the series presents a symbiosis between two types of technology: one contemporary, electronic and digital; and the other pre-Columbian, made of mud, fire, air, and water. A collection of ceramic instruments which the artist produced at EKWC form the basis for two new works: the kinetic installation Mitote (2023) and the dance performance Ollin (2023) created with Siet Raeymaekers, Francesca Mariano, and Fernanda Soberón.

Mitote and Ollin are commissioned by iii in collaboration with Rewire, Amare, Overtoon, STUK, and iMal.

Vivian Caccuri & Thiago Lanis Fantasma Boca (Mouth Ghost)

Fantasma Boca (Mouth Ghost) (2023) is a sound performance where Brazilian artists Vivian Caccuri and Thiago Lanis recreate the soundscape of a tropical forest. Sounds are recreated one by one and birds, insects, water, air, and other beings are simulated by the performers using their lips and mouths only.

Mouth Ghost (Fantasma Boca) is commissioned by iii, The Hague in collaboration with Rewire and Novas Frequências.

The visit of Vivian Caccuri and Thiago Lanis is made possible by the International Visitors Programme of Nieuwe Instituut with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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