Sunday Seminar | Catherine Christer Hennix
Theory — Feb 18, 2018
- Price
- €3,- (excluding entrance fee)
- Location
- Teijin Auditorium
- Time
- Feb 18, 2018, 2.45 pm until 4.45 pm
- Main language
- English
- Admission
- Tickets
On the occasion of the exhibition Catherine Christer Hennix: Traversée du Fantasme and the performance Blue(s) in Green to the 31 Limit, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Sonic Acts organize a Sunday Seminar on the work of artist and musician Catherine Christer Hennix. Writer and Professor of English at York University in Toronto Marcus Boon will converse with the artist, discussing how her many practices as a mathematician, logician, composer, musician, visual artist and Lacanian coalesce into the diverse oeuvre that is presented in the museum.
While Catherine Christer Hennix is best known as a sound artist and composer, she has also produced a body of visual art that crosses boundaries between painting, sculpture, and anti-art — what Hennix refers to in own personal nomenclature as ‘Epistemic Art’. Hennix’s work plays with the transmission of meaning, drawing on a wide range of references that touch on logic, intuitionistic mathematics, modal music, and psychoanalysis. Using an overtly obtuse and densely formalized personal language, Hennix forces the viewer towards a state she terms ‘homosemioesis’: a subjective process of meaning-making that nullifies any possibility of a transfer of knowledge between the work of art and the viewer.
PROGRAM
2:45 Doors open
3:00 Word of welcome by Karen Archey
3:10 Introducing the oeuvre of Catherine Christer Hennix by Marcus Boon
3:30 Conversation Marcus Boon & Catherine Christer Hennix
4:30 Q&A
4:45 End of the program, attendees can visit the exhibition
MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Karen Archey is a Curator of Contemporary Art, Time-based Media at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Prior to joining the Stedelijk, she worked as an art critic, independent curator, and editor of e-flux conversations in Berlin and New York. She is the organizing curator of the exhibition Catherine Christer Hennix: Traversée du Fantasme together with co-curator Lawrence Kumpf, Artistic Director of Blank Forms.
Marcus Boon is a writer and Professor of English at York University in Toronto and contributing writer about music for The Wire. He recently finished work on a book on the ontology of music entitled The Politics of Vibration, and is working on a monograph on Catherine Christer Hennix. He authored numerous publications and co-edited Practice, a collection of writings on practice in the visual arts, with Gabriel Levine (MIT/Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Arts series, 2018).
Catherine Christer Hennix is a composer, philosopher, mathematician and visual artist living and working in Berlin. She started her creative career playing drums with her older brother Peter growing up in Sweden. Directly after high school, Hennix went to work at Stockholm’s pioneering Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), where she helped develop early synthesizer and tape music. After traveling to New York in 1968, she met Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles and developed a fruitful relationship with many composers in the burgeoning American avant-garde, including, most significantly, Henry Flynt and La Monte Young.
CREDITS
In 2017 the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Sonic Acts initiated a long-term research trajectory dedicated to the lesser-known pioneers of sound art. The first stage of this collaboration activated the archives of American composer and sound artist Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009). The performance Blue(s) in Green to the 31 Limit and the exhibition Catherine Christer Hennix: Traversée du Fantasme are organized by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in collaboration with Sonic Acts, as part of their collaborative mission to diversify the canon of sound art.
This program is part of Sonic Acts Academy 2018 and Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union. For more information, visit www.sonicacts.com.
