Tuning

8 Apr–15 Jul 2022

Tuning is a technical process through which channels of sound reproduction and perception are adjusted. The Tuning project explores ways of listening, speaking, and communicating with one another in a new, unfamiliar reality.

Hearing is one of our instruments of self-knowledge.
Are we ready to find ourselves amidst new, incomprehensible, and unfamiliar (acoustic) situations, and to attempt to attune to one another within them?

Dmitry Kurlyandsky, composer

Work on Tuning began during the quarantine in 2020, a time during which connections were falling apart and new mechanisms of communication coming into being, when rules were constantly changing and the world seemed to have, as it were, fallen out of tune. Inevitably, questions about the possibility of artistic production in these new conditions arose.

It was against this background that artists from various generations created the series of sound installations which constitute the Tuning exhibition. These installations give rise to unexpected, differing acoustic situations, and invite us to attune to the architecture of GES-2. Their sounds seem almost to assist the futuristic, transformed historical space of the former power station come into its own in the present.

Tuning continues the exploration of the interrelation of sound and architecture that was begun by the Geometry of Now project, held in 2017 at GES-2 before the building closed for reconstruction. The works of artists who have shaped Russia’s contemporary music scene—Eduard Artemyev, Dmitry Vlasik, Oleg Gudachev, Darya Zvezdina, Vangelino Currentzis and musicAeterna, and Vladimir Rannev—enter into dialogue with Renzo Piano’s architecture, experimenting with its harmonies and dissonances and encouraging us to physically and intuitively experience the space, now free of the material traces of previous exhibitions. This said, Tuning is not confined by the walls of GES-2: the artists’ projects rather seek acoustic means of breaking through them, of moving beyond their bounds.

Like the exhibition of sound installations, the Tuning concert programme proposes a highly diverse sound experience: from Alexei Lubimov’s reconstruction of an 1840s acoustic atmosphere to the concert-performance of the director, composer, and singer Vladislavs Nastavševs to the benefit performance of the Questa Musica Ensemble directed by Philipp Chizhevsky.

The culmination of the Tuning concert programme will be the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble’s performance, All Falls Silent, in which works written especially for GES-2 by Anton Svetlichny and Boris Filanovsky will be heard for the first time.

Curator
Dmitry Renansky

Composers
Eduard Artemyev, Dmitry Vlasik, Oleg Gudachev, Darya Zvezdina (featuring Andrey Guryanov), Vangelino Currentzis, Sergej Newski, Vladimir Rannev, Anton Svetlichny, Alexey Sysoev, Boris Filanovsky

Performers
Ekaterina Antonenko, Teodor Currentzis, Arina Zvereva, Alexei Lubimov, Yulia Migunova, Vladislavs Nastavševs, Aleksandra Serikova, Philipp Chizhevsky

Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble
Intrada Vocal Ensemble
musicAeterna orchestra
N’Caged Vocal Ensemble
Questa Musica Ensemble

Sound director
Damien Quintard

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