Introduction

Spring Workshop will welcome Ari Benjamin Meyers to Hong Kong to present An exposition, not an exhibition, the debut of the foundational themes of Kunsthalle for Music (KFM), a new institution conceived and directed by composer and artist Meyers and founded in collaboration with Witte de With and Spring Workshop.

“As 2017 will be our final year of the Spring Workshop initiative, it is poetic and meaningful to dedicate ourselves to founding a new experimental art institution –the Kunsthalle for Music – and to do so once again with our beloved, trusted partners at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art,” says Spring Founder Mimi Brown. “In the coming year, we are especially interested in looking at the question of why the visual arts and music have disparate audiences, and then creating a program that dissolves the artificial lines that have been drawn, offering cultural audiences a fresh way to encounter music.”

The multi-sited exhibition to be held March 11 – April 1, 2017, is orchestrated by Meyers for an ensemble of performers and composers who will write and perform new commissions in experimental collaborations with seven arts organizations across the city, thus dissolving the delineation beween Hong Kong’s art and music landscapes. Simultaneously at Spring Workshop, professional musicians from the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble will engage in a durational performance of a wide swath of the contemporary music canon, overturning the rules usually applied to a presentation of these works.

By assembling a brand-new ensemble of performers and composers from across these two disciplines, Meyers imagines a space for music that exists outside of recordings and of staged environments, finding instead landing pads within the tightknit network of the city’s art institutions. These new works by Meyers seek to catalyse and make visible the inherent frictions between performers, audience and institutions.

An exposition, not an exhibition was developed during Ari Benjamin Meyers’ two residencies at Spring Workshop in the summer and fall of 2016, and springs from research into the essence of live musical performance and the questions surrounding its protocols for audiences, performer and institutions. This presentation showcases the first iteration of research, that will then lead to the inaugural exhibition of the Kunsthalle for Music at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam) in January 2018.