Ho Tzu Nyen
Earth
20 January – 20 February 2011
with
Oren Ambarchi
Live Sound Score Performances
7.30pm Monday 24 and Tuesday 25 January
Artspace, Sydney
43–51 Cowper Wharf Road
Woolloomooloo
NSW 2011
Sydney, Australia
www.artspace.org.au
Curated by Artspace Executive Director Blair French, the exhibition features three major video works – NEWTON (2009), ZARATHUSTRA: A FILM FOR EVERYONE AND NO-ONE (2009/2010) and the centrepiece 42 minute work EARTH (2009/2010), a ‘videographic’ remix of primarily seventeenth and eighteenth century Italian and French paintings in which the human body is penetrated, fragmented and re-arranged.
Ho Tzu Nyen creates audio-visual artworks that translate and compress biographies, philosophical ideas and scientific anecdotes into highly staged and choreographed ‘text-less’ images and sounds that seek to communicate at the level of the nervous system. He makes projects that have been presented in cinemas, galleries and theatres, as well as on television. His work evidences a strong interest in the relationship between images and sound, as well as avant-garde music from different parts of the world, and he frequently collaborates with musicians to produce new and radically divergent versions of soundtracks for his works. Echoing his approach to video and film-making, he choreographs every element of his exhibition installations with precision, looking to create an experience of the exhibition itself that is actively relational and intensely durational, resonating conceptually and rhythmically with the moving imagery.
About Ho Tzu Nyen: Ho Tzu Nyen’s first feature film, HERE, premiered at the 41st Director’s Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival (2009). He has exhibited widely, including in the Sao Paulo Biennale (2004), the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005), the Singapore Biennale (2006), and the Dojima River Biennale (2009). ZARATHUSTRA: A FILM FOR EVERYONE AND NO-ONE, a doom-metal adaptation and ‘compression’ of Nietzsche’s philosophical novel, was made in collaboration with film, music, fine arts, acting and musical theatre students from a Singaporean arts college, for the Asia-Pacific Triennial (2009) in Queensland, Australia.
About Oren Ambarchi: Oren Ambarchi is a composer and multi-instrumentalist with longstanding interests in transcending conventional instrumental approaches. His work focuses mainly on the exploration of the guitar, ‘re-routing the instrument into a zone of alien abstraction where it’s no longer easily identifiable as itself. Instead, it’s a laboratory for extended sonic investigation’. (The Wire, UK). Ambarchi works with simple constructs and parameters, exploring one idea over an extended duration and patiently teasing every nuance and implication from each texture; the phenomena of sum and difference tones; carefully tended arrangements that unravel gently; unprepossessing melodies that slowly work their way through various permutations; all resulting in an otherworldly, cumulative impact of patiently unfolding compositions.
Presented in association with Sydney Festival 2011.
Artspace is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. Artspace is assisted by the New South Wales Government through Arts NSW and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
