Naama Tsabar at Faena Art Center Buenos Aires
Faena Art presents “Melodies of Certain Damage (Opus 2)”, a new sonic and immersive, site-specific exhibition by Israeli artist Naama Tsabar.
Israeli artist Naama Tsabar has spent her prolific career exploring the connections among conceptual art, performance, and music with
interactive sonic installations that have been exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York, Pianissimo Gallery in Milan and Tel Aviv’s
Dvir Gallery. This month, she’ll debut Melodies of Certain Damage (Opus 2) at Faena Art Center Buenos Aires during Art Basel Cities.
Like many of her previous artworks that explore questions of power, eroticism, gender and memory, this site-specific sonic environment will tune the entire Sala Molinos exhibition space, activated by a number of female-identifying and gender-nonconforming musicians and performers. “There is a certain kind of community- related collaboration and participation within my work, and I find that with women it is easier to achieve things without anybody overpowering someone else,” the artist told Whitewall Magazine.
There is a lot of listening and a lot of patience, and that’s really important to creation.
—Naama Tsabar
Appropriating an iconic and overtly macho trope of breaking the guitar during a punk or rock and roll performance, Tsabar repurposes the broken pieces as objects of beauty, instruments in their own right, and the act of playing these relics of virility creates a new kind of quiet power. In doing so, the installation appropriates and subverts the aggressive gestures of rock and roll and their associations with masculinity, while at the same time encouraging a new mode for public engagement with sculpture and sound.
“We are honored to host Naama Tsabar in Buenos Aires and to co-commission her latest body of work and new site-specific performance, which breaks with traditional divides between popular music and contemporary art,” said Alan Faena. “Her sonic environment proposes a new exhibition and concert format that disrupts our experience of the Faena Art Center and exemplifies our commitment to supporting artists as they work across disciplines and geographic boundaries.”
