Meredith Monk: Calling

“I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema.” —Meredith Monk

The exhibition Meredith Monk. Calling is the most comprehensive survey to date dedicated to the artist’s multidisciplinary work, presenting Meredith Monk’s oeuvre as innovative, multi-sensorial installations embracing the cross-disciplinary way in which she has worked throughout her career.

Monk (b. 1942, New York) pushes the boundaries of music, theater, dance, video, and installation, seamlessly working across disciplines while continuously exploring the evocative power of the human voice. She is considered a groundbreaking figure in site-specific performance, and her interdisciplinary approach has had a significant influence on subsequent generations of artists and performers. The survey offers a long overdue analysis of Monk’s practice through art historical, feminist, and philosophical lenses and shows her continued influence in thinking about universal values, humanity’s relationship to nature, and planetary consciousness.

The exhibition restages Monk’s early site-specific works and presents her recent multimedia installations, including the newly commissioned Songs of Ascension Shrine (2023), a three-channel audio-video work that developed from a collaboration with the artist Ann Hamilton. In addition, diverse materials including unpublished compositions, photographs, drawings, posters, film footage, objects, and costumes, retrace the various stages of her career and the wider artistic network in which Monk has moved: a cosmos of interconnected exchange that started in downtown New York in the 1960s.

Curated by Anna Schneider with Teresa Retzer.

Exhibition architecture by 2050+ 

This survey exhibition has been developed in close collaboration with Meredith Monk and The House Foundation for the Arts. The exhibition is a collaboration in two acts at Haus der Kunst München and Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, together with the Hartwig Art Foundation.

Public programme
November 10, 2023, 6pm (Zoom, UTC+1)
Meredith Monk and Hilton Als in conversation. Please register online in advance.

November 16–19, 2023 and January 18–21, 2024
Meredith Monk: Film Screenings

February 15, 2024
Trio Concert: Meredith Monk, Katie Geissinger, and Allison Sniffin

February 16, 2024
Meredith Monk and Adam Shatz in Conversation

February 17, 2024
Duet Behavior: Meredith Monk and John Hollenbeck

The publication Meredith Monk. Calling, with contributions by Hilton Als, Siri Engberg, Andrea Lissoni, Bonnie Marranca, Rick Moody, Timothy Morton, Teresa Retzer, Beatrix Ruf, Anna Schneider, Adam Shatz, Louise Steinman, and others, is forthcoming in January 2024.

Meredith Monk—The Recordings, a 13-CD limited edition box set is issued by Munich-based ECM Recordings, compiling all of Meredith Monk’s releases on the label since Dolmen Music in 1981.