Introduction

Tacet, from Latin tacere, is a playing instruction in music. If it appears in a score, the instrumentalist or singer is required to pause during the marked interval – to remain silent. 

Absence, silence and the idiosyncratic power of imagination and memory are performed in the first institutional solo survey exhibition of the American artist and composer – Ari Benjamin Meyers – in Germany. In Meyers’ enactment, the visitor enters a staged situation rather than an exhibition space. She or he inevitably becomes part of the scenario invoked in Tacet. Meyers – who in his work explores, transgresses and shifts the boundaries between the disciplines of music and art – combines in the Kasseler Kunstverein aspects of immersive theater with questions of contemporary art and music. 

The installation refers to a selection of performances by the artist, all of which are missing the corresponding characteristics of music, sound and movement. Two voices eventually break through the silence in Tacet: the voice of the peculiar archivist performed by art historian Jörn Schafaff, and that of the visitor her or himself.