Naama Tsabar: Melodies of Certain Damage (Opus 2)

Faena Art is pleased to announce Melodies of Certain Damage (Opus 2), a site-sensitive sculptural and sonic installation and performance conceived by artist Naama Tsabar to coincide with Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires. 

“We are honored to invite Naama Tsabar to Buenos Aires and commission her latest body of work and new site-specific performance which breaks with traditional divides between popular music and contemporary art. Her sonic environment proposes a new exhibition and concert format that disrupts our experience of the Faena Art Center and exemplifies our commitment to supporting artists as they work across disciplines”, said Alan Faena. 

Tsabar creates experiential, sculptural, sonic installations that explore questions of power, eroticism, gender, and memory. Curated by Zoe Lukov, this is her first exhibition in Argentina, a site-sensitive environment and the largest-scale installation of this latest body of work. Lukov commented, “Naama tunes the entire Sala Molinos of the Faena Art Center, repurposing the remnants of an act of male bravado and violence. The death of the object becomes the starting point for new works that are both maps for the memory of the damage, instruments in their own right, and ultimately a suggestion for how we can move forward, towards new forms for creation.” 

Tsabar’s work underlines the way in which a venue for performance may function as a structure of power. In this case, her refusal to engage with the monumentality of the Sala Molinos is a transgressive act that encourages sensuality and intimacy with the installation and with the performance. Appropriating the iconic and overtly macho trope of smashing the guitar, Naama reimagines the broken pieces as objects of visual and functional significance, highlighting the pieces by inserting them back into a working order. The once iconic object now turns into a field of scattered pieces, transforming the held instrument into a new territory for the performer to insert themselves into. 

The rhizomatic structure of the installation necessitates a shift in the gaze and in perspective—a multiplicity of viewpoints with no centrality. The public can touch the works and move through them—a variation on the communal gathering experience and a new radical and disruptive mode for public engagement with sculpture and sound.

Melodies of Certain Damage (Opus 2) will be composed during a one-week residency in Buenos Aires with two of Tsabar’s long-time collaborators, Rose Blanshei and Sarah Strauss, and six Buenos Aires-based female identifying and gender nonconforming musicians: Gabriela Areal, Florencia Curci, Violeta García, Luciana Rizzo, Natalia Spiner, and Carola Zelaschi, and will respond to the particular musical context of Buenos Aires.

Hours:
September 6, 12–8pm,
6pm performance

September 7, 12–6pm,
7pm performance

September 8, 12–8pm, 
Performance 6 and 8pm

Free and open to the public. More info
 

About Faena Art
Faena Art is a nonprofit organization that houses and produces post-disciplinary and time-based experiences. A catalyst for innovative, site-specific, and immersive creative practices, Faena Art is a transformative bridge across the Americas, between the south and the north, the popular and the experimental, activism and research. Faena Art fosters new models for performative social interaction that transcend the traditional boundaries of art, science, philosophy, and social practice.