Kunsthalle for Music
Act I: 7 Pieces in and around Museum Abteiberg
from the repertoire of Ari Benjamin Meyers
Thursday, June 23, 2022, 7—10 pm in the sculpture garden
For one evening on the 40th anniversary of the opening of Museum Abteiberg, the museum’s sculpture garden and “slab level” will be transformed into KUNSTHALLE FOR MUSIC: 7 locations for 7 pieces at the intersection of music and art, a space for listening, participating, and celebrating. Berlin-based American artist and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers founded the nomadic meta-institution KUNSTHALLE FOR MUSIC in 2017. It has since appeared in various forms in Hong Kong, Rotterdam, Moscow, Santa Barbara, and Philadelphia. The latest appearance — in the Museum Abteiberg sculpture garden as part of POP Paradiso 2022 — is the prelude to KUNSTHALLE FOR MUSIC in Mönchengladbach. Meyers is currently preparing Act II and Act III: an exhibition for Museum Abteiberg and a major production for both the museum and the city of Mönchengladbach.
The KUNSTHALLE FOR MUSIC program will begin after an anniversary speech by Mayor Felix Heinrichs, on June 23 at 7 p.m. It will feature at various locations around the sculpture garden, on the museum’s slab level and in the foyer of the museum, and performed by regional as well as national, professional and non-professional singers and performers. Participants include, among others, the conductor Yorgos Ziavras, music director of Theater Krefeld und Mönchengladbach, and soprano Maria Portela Larisch. Visitors will hear solos, duets, and choral pieces in a variety of languages. Selected pieces from Meyers’s repertoire can be heard in Act 1: Anthem (2017), Module 4 from Serious Immobilities (2013), Vexations 2 (2013), Solo (2009), Duet (2014), The Lightning and Its Flash (2011), Music is Not, A Manifesto (2017/2021). Audience members are invited to actively participate in some of the content.
Ari Benjamin Meyers (b. 1972 in New York), trained at the Juilliard School, Yale University, and Peabody Institute in Baltimore, and has been working in Berlin since the late 1990s. His practice explores the interface between visual art and music. His KUNSTHALLE FOR MUSIC, founded in 2017, was conceived as a nomadic institution meant to create unique, musical-experiential spaces at visual art venues. As such, the project also marks a return to the analog roots of musical reception – without streaming or data carriers; instead it turns the immediate, unfiltered experience of a concert into an exhibition.
POP Paradiso was initiated in 2021 in cooperation with Museum Abteiberg, Museumsverein Abteiberg e.V., and Kulturbüro MG, and organized by the agency terz machen. It is held under the auspices of the Mayor of Mönchengladbach, Felix Heinrichs. The festival in our anniversary year 2022 is sponsored by the Hans Fries Foundation, Heinrich Schmidt GmbH & Co. KG, and Gladbach & Westend district management.