It starts on 15 September2023 in the FMAV Palazzina dei Giardini exhibition venue, with Strahlen / Raggi, an important solo show by German artist and composer Carsten Nicolai, known internationally by the pseudonym Alva Noto, who for the first time in Italy brings together a major set of recent works and an original project devised during the Covid-19 lockdown. The exhibition is curated by Lorenzo Respi.
The title Strahlen/Raggi not only alludes to the physical laws of propagation of light particles and sound waves, but in poetic terms also to the energy given off by the object-work of art devised by human creative genius. While exploring the transitional areas between music, art and science, Carsten Nicolai sets out to break through the human being’s perceptive and sensory barriers while trying to incorporate physical phenomena, such as sound and light, in a single immersive, multisensory experience. These Strahlen propagate following calculable and predictable mathematical and geometric patterns. However, they can suddenly become distorted, prompting errors or, conversely, self-organizing structures. The artist’s intervention on these physicals events takes aesthetic shape in site-specific installations and paintings in which a complex code of acoustic and visual signs establishes a close connection between the human body and the surrounding space, seeking to cancel out their physical distance through sensorial interaction.
The exhibition is put on in collaboration with Berlin independent record label NOTON, also producers of the “ray collector” vinyl inspired by the exhibited work of the same name. Strahlen/Raggi is also put on in collaboration with the Modena Smart Life Festival 2023 and will feature Alva Noto in a live performance at Teatro Storchi on Thursday 28 September 2023.
Bio
Carsten Nicolai, known by the pseudonym Alva Noto on the electronic music scene, is a Berlin-based German artist and composer. His work focuses on exploring the intersections between music, art and science. Through sound experiments in the field of electronic music, he has drawn up his own original, cymatics-inspired code of expression in the audiovisual sphere, following the theory that attempts to demonstrate the morphogenetic effects of sound waves. He has worked alongside numerous internationally renowned artists, including Ryūichi Sakamoto, Ryoji Ikeda, Blixa Bargeld and Mika Vainio. For Mexican film director Alejandro González Iñárritu, he composed music for the Redivivo film soundtrack and the sound design of the Carne y Arena virtual reality installation. An internationally renowned artist, he has exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Tate Modern in London. His works have been displayed in important solo and group exhibitions, including Documenta X in Kassel, and the 49th and 50th Venice Biennale.
Image
Carsten Nicolai, reflektordistortion
