Ari Benjamin Meyers. Solo for Ayumi

About

Entitled Solo for Ayumi, the exhibition will expand Meyers’ series of scores and performative works, built on an ongoing artistic relationship with Berlin-based violinist Ayumi Paul. 

This exhibition takes place at a decisive moment in Meyers’ rapidly developing career, as the artist will be participating in this fall 14th Biennale de Lyon, as well as in the 2018 Liverpool Biennial. This year also marks the unfolding of Meyers’ institutional project Kunsthalle for Music, co-founded together with Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong.

Earlier this year, the two artists—who have been friends for more than fifteen years—engaged in a correspondence based on Paul’s life. From the approximately thirty letters that she sent him, Meyers chose twelve to which he responded by inscribing them with a multi-part score, composing both a musical portrait and abstraction of the violin player. Every day for the duration of the exhibition, Paul will be present in the gallery space, enacting Meyers’ interpretation of her life on her violin. Alongside this performance, which will form the core of the exhibition, the artist chose to exhibit selected objects and artifacts belonging to Paul as diptychs, paired with the letter-scores.

This musical portrait of Ayumi Paul will unveil itself in multiple layers: through her letters and Meyers’ score, as well as through her performance. With Solo for Ayumi, Meyers addresses the complex connection between the artist and his muse, the composer and his interpreter, while playing with the concept of the solo as both a musical and an exhibition form. Solo for Ayumi embodies what it entails to live one’s life through music, when a musical instrument becomes an extension of oneself and literally plays the performer’s life.

Meyers’ work explores structures and processes that redefine the performative, social, and ephemeral nature of music. His conceptual projects and installations often draw attention to concrete details of music-making otherwise taken for granted and make tangible underlying conceptual operations. Recent works have addressed music scores themselves, forms and arrangements of musical instruments and ensembles, concert settings, and gestures of performers and conductors. At the same time, his compositions and performances seek to challenge the relationship between performer and audience, giving form to the practice of musicians and composers, and musical structures in the context of visual art.