CODEX SUBPARTUM (2019)

exhibition at ms2 | Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź by Michał Libera (concept, scores, music - field recordings), Barbara Kinga Majewska (concept, scores, music - voice) and Konrad Smoleński (sculpture, music - electronics, bomb)

with music performed by Zinc & Copper - Elena Kakaliagou (horn), Hilary Jeffery (trombone) and Robin Hayward (microtonal tuba) and recorded by Michał Kupicz

part of PROTOTYPES curated by Daniel Muzyczuk, produced and coordinated by Katarzyna Mróz

Prototypes is a project that confronts artists with the task of conducting research on objects from the collection while embracing their own artistic practice as a method of mediation. The key moment in the process involves selecting the research method. Since that method is unconstrained bystrictures of the institutional art world, the effects of such artistic investigation may come as a surprise even to those well familiar with the collections of the Muzeum Sztuki.

In the second iteration of the project, artists subject their visual works to impulses originating from the field of music. The pieces that have largely come into being outside of the sphere of sound receive a sound layer as if the tacit intention of their makers consisted in making them audible. Thus, the sign left on paper becomes a performance instruction, and not only an element that builds the meaning of the image, or, going even further, as if it were only the process of execution that reveals hidden elements indispensable for the meaning of the image.

At the same time, each of the pieces required a different approach, as if the visual expression contained not only the score, but also hints to assist its reconstruction.

The works began to appear as hermetic worlds that can only be unsealed by means of sound. This is how Codex Subpartum came into being – a music album with eight tracks that taps into the museum space over a timespan of eight weeks.

Each of the tracks will serve the needs of a detailed presentation of the executed work, track by track, set in pairs with pieces from the MS collection.

Daniel Muzyczuk

LINE-UP

1. Wacław Szpakowski, From the series A: A 1 (1930) - for microtonal tuba, trombone, voice

2. Milan Grygar, Score (1973)- for microtonal tuba, trombone, horn, voice, electronics, field recordings

3. Alina Szapocznikow, Drawing 41 (ca. 1970)- for voice

4. Władysław Strzemiński, untitled, from the cycle: Faces (1942) - for horn

5. Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Rain (2005) - for microtonal tuba, trombone, horn, field recordings

6. Joseph Beuys, Beuys by Warhol (1980) - for microtonal tuba, trombone, horn

7. Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2.0 (2009-2011) - for microtonal tuba, trombone, horn, voice, electronics, bomb, field recordings

8. Bob Cobbing, untitled (1976) - for microtonal tuba, trombone, horn