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Lectures & Events - 2008 Art & Culture series

All events take place at SITE Santa Fe (unless otherwise noted)

TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 6 PM
TOD WILLIAMS AND BILLIE TSIEN, ARCHITECTS
Current Work

“We see architecture as an act of profound optimism. Its foundation lies in believing that it is possible to make places on the earth that can give a sense of grace to life – and in believing that that matters.” - Tod Williams and Billie Tsien

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s architecture aims to alter our personal and collective experiences of space and place. Their practice responds to investigations and ideas about how buildings relate to a particular site and how one constructs forms that balance logic with intuition. Their architectural endeavors speak with great subtlety about the importance of the physical and conceptual space that exists between objects, people, and their environment. Elegant and refined, their minimalist constructions pay careful attention to context. Within the museum setting, for example, their work bridges the gap between architecture, fine art, and people by encouraging visitors to experience space through physical movement. They create and integrate multiple paths that traverse and circulate space, allowing viewers to experience their environment through various, shifting perspectives. For Lucky Number Seven, Williams and Tsien have created an exhibition design that embodies the principles of their practice, and SITE Santa Fe is honored to collaborate with them in the creation of their work for the Seventh International Biennial.

In their presentation, they will speak about their current projects in the United States, Hong Kong, and India.

Co-sponsored by Avalon Trust

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 6 PM
CLASH CLASS: SALVATION SOUND
An evening with Nadine Robinson, Treasure Don and DJ DRM

Join us for Clash Class: Salvation Sound a collaborative performance event hosted by Biennial artist Nadine Robinson (a.k.a. NayRob), featuring deejay and vocalist Treasure Don and his crew, as they experiment with electronic sound and human movement inspired by the Jamaican sound system. A vanguard approach to music-making, the Jamaican sound system produced the now ubiquitous remix; it served as a blueprint for underground raves and fostered the collaborations between deejays and crews. Robinson considers the Jamaican sound system an important point of departure for her work. This mode of sound production is based on the interactions that occur between "human actors and the mechanical systems of musical amplification, including turntables, audio electronics, and speakers."1

As a group-based musical act, Clash Class reflects Lucky Number Seven’s guiding principles of collaboration, experimentation, ephemerality, and newly commissioned work. Robinson’s work and her performance is a complex anomaly of the secular and the religious through her choice of musical styles which range from roots to rock, and from reggae to Gregorian chants.

1 John Constantinides, The Sound System: Contributions to Jamaica Music and the Montreal Dancehall Scene, 2002

Co-sponsored by Mariquita Masterson

Molly Sturges and Chris Jonas	John Kennedy Photo credit: Sarah Stathas

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 7:30 PM
MALANGAN
Musical Performance

Join us for a collaborative musical event celebrating the 2008 Biennial, built as a disarticulation and recirculation of the images, words, and spaces of the exhibition. John Kennedy, Molly Sturges and Chris Jonas will compose a piece for multiple ensembles placed throughout the installation space, involving members of Santa Fe New Music and other musicians from the area. The performers will be linked using various compositional means to explore the realms of ephemerality, collaboration and process.

In certain Oceanic traditions, malangan are funerary effigies or monuments to the dead. Mourners make these assemblages of wood or woven vines and decorate the surface with carvings of animals, birds, shells, and human figures. The perishable monument is placed over a human grave as a marker, then left to decompose, and after the human soul is understood to have left the body, the remains are gathered to fertilize gardens.

It is through this metaphor of a ceremony to commemorate the dead that the artists hope to share the transformative powers of decay and revitalization—and in the context of the Biennial—accommodating simultaneous resonances of death and rebirth, of loss and renewal, of closure and new beginnings.

Co-sponsored by Box Gallery

Art & Culture is an ongoing series designed to address contemporary art and cultural issues through lectures, discussions, symposia, and multidisciplinary programming.

Unless otherwise noted, tickets for the programs listed here are: $10 for Adults; $5 for students & seniors, and SITE Santa Fe members at Friend, and Family levels. SITE Santa Fe members at the Supporter level and above, free with advance reservation. Seating is limited, advance purchase is recommended.