Tris Vonna-Michell Exhibition
Metro Pictures
This event has ended.
Presenting a range of installation-narratives for his first exhibition at Metro Pictures, Tris Vonna-Michell exhibits a new sound edit of "Leipzig Calendar Works" (2011), which recalls the peaceful 1989 demonstration of East German citizens at the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, district headquarters in Leipzig. Merging this with descriptions of a feverish initiative to destroy incriminating documents before citizens stormed the agency's Berlin headquarters, Vonna-Michell's chronicle becomes a patchwork account of the months leading up to German reunification. Here, signals and pulses, repetition and overlay are edited in the recording to correspond to the slide sequences he displays on anachronistic projectors. As Vonna-Michell seems to earnestly meander through his monologue he alludes to the crafted structure of the very story he is telling, and suddenly the credibility of the words he speaks and the images he presents are cast into fiction.
Vonna-Michell develops his narratives over extended periods of time, altering and adding to them to make each of their iterations unique. Listening to his studio recordings, aural performance documentation, or abstract speech compositions, which he refers to as "audio poems," one is spellbound by the dizzying stream of his words. Vonna-Michell's installations beguile his audience with ostensive objects and projected images as his monologues reconstitute their respective histories and significance. It is the rapid-fire of his words however—whether heard on overhead speakers, headphones or in a small live audience—and methodical combination of fact with fiction that serves to disrupt his listeners' otherwise stabile sense of time and space and enmesh them in an adaptation that suspends doubt and distance.
Media
Schedule
from September 15, 2011 to October 22, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-15 from 18:00 to 20:00