Toward "The Reach Of Resonance" And "The Nine Muses"

Still from The Nine Muses
John Akomfrah, 2011
Image courtesy of Icarus Films


The Reach of Resonance
March 15, 16 at 12:30 PM FREE

East Building Concourse, Auditorium, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Four musicians and sound artists from radically different backgrounds—Miya Masaoka, a koto performer and composer inspired by insects and plants; Jon Rose, a violin virtuoso whose "found music" created with fencing and other apparatus has attracted the Kronos Quartet; John Luther Adams, whose tones are motivated by the natural landscape; and Bob Ostertag, who integrates sociopolitical concerns into his pieces—not only express their perceptions about music but use their musical talents to create ingenious social harmonies in an increasingly hostile universe. (Steve Elkins, 2010, HD-Cam, 118 minutes)

The Nine Muses
preceded by Sack Barrow
March 17 at 2:00 PM

East Building Concourse, Auditorium

The Nine Muses, the latest creation of the Ghana-born British film and installation artist John Akomfrah, is a layered meditation on human mass migration and its relationship to land use and culture. Combining footage of isolated places and rarely traveled roads; readings from classic texts by Homer, Dante, T. S. Eliot, and others; and the music of Arvo Pärt and India's Gundecha Brothers, Akomfrah has created an evocative journey through myth and environment, a self-described "Proustian attempt to suggest the idea of migration." (John Akomfrah, 2011, HD-Cam, 94 minutes)

Artist and experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers' Sack Barrow poetically portrays (in outmoded 16 mm format) the fading milieu of a pre–World War II factory near London during its final days of operation in 2010. Without voiceover or interview, he carefully records the routines of the last workers, traces of chemical corrosion and continuing decay, as well as the sense of ineffable sadness present in time's passing. (Ben Rivers, 2011, 16 mm, 20 minutes)

Credit: Copyright © 2012 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.