The Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon offers Tal Isaac Hadad his first monographic exhibition in France. It will feature an ensemble of works and sound performances generated from new forms of exchange with the public.
Tal Isaac Hadad is a young French visual artist. His sound art is constructed from an analysis of listening experiences and musical objects. His approach, which mostly begins with an observation of the musical scene or from the presence of sound in public spaces, is evocative of that of an ethnomusicologist. He is interested in the therapeutic, social and artistic dimensions of music.
His performances generate an array of auditory sensations amongst listeners that provoke a large range of emotions. It is the latter, naturally present in the context of a concert hall or an opera, which he restitutes and decomposes in the space of the museum in order to invite the public to become aware of it. Récital pour un masseur for example communicates through song the physical sensation of the singers being massaged. The performance Through you generates a sense of excitement and nervousness.
The exhibition makes use of a large community of singers, choirs and therapists. This subversion of therapeutic and musical functions is also reflected in the transformation of musical instruments, i.e., the transformation of a piano in a certain piece done with the aid of piano makers.
The artist
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Nom de l'artisteTal Isaac Hadad
Born in 1976, Tal Isaac Hadad is a French visual artist.
After graduating in Sonic Arts at the University of Middlesex, London, Tal Isaac Hadad took a Master in Arts and Politics
(SPEAP) at Sciences Po Paris. Tal Isaac Hadad participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010 and the FIAC 2012 in Paris. He was invited to the Marrakech Biennale in 2013 and to the Philharmonie de Paris in 2014. In 2017, he performed at the Opéra de Montpellier as part of a residency with an event entitled Ouverture, a programme of performances for choir and soloist. This gave rise to the piece Récital pour un masseur (Recital for a Masseur), which was programmed at the last São Paulo Biennale and presented in 2019 at the National Gallery in Singapore.
More information
For his first solo exhibition in France, the artist is occupying the space of the Museum with a number of performances involving musical instruments, opera singers and masseurs. His installations and performances are spread over three rooms, in which visitors are invited to listen to their own senses.
Regarder Respirer, the exhibition devised by Tal Isaac Hadad, is constructed in a sequence of movements in the manner
of a symphony. Through various types of experience, the visitor is drawn into the artist’s fascinating world; for several years now, he has been deconstructing the basic principles of classical music and opera.
These recorded or live performances, which involve piano or voice, encourage visitors to identify certain basic phenomena that enable the emotions triggered by the music and the voice to be felt more intensely.
The way the spectator and the participants experience the moment and the act of listening are central to the five works presented: five moments, five encounters with the visitor’s sense of hearing and their emotions.
Tal Isaac Hadad is interested in the therapeutic, social and artistic dimensions of music. By bringing the act of listening into the museum he changes the emphasis of our usual experience of music and explores its nature as one of many sensory experiences.
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Titre
Récital pour un masseur
Récital pour un masseur (Recital for a masseur) is a choral work, an artistic, sound performance resulting from the encounter between an artist, some singers and a masseur. Being professionally trained to listen to their own bodies, muscular tensions and air column, the soloists impact the masseur’s manipulations in their own voices. The sound is thus dictated by the body. It is then picked up as a chorus by the other singers in the room. The performance is spontaneous and unscored, and with the only instruction being to “let go”, it sets up the conditions for listening to oneself and to one another, and does so in a context conducive to exchange, where the masseur has a pivotal role in guiding the group rather like that of an orchestra conductor.
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Titre
Adagio
Adagio (800% deeper) is the product of a creative process that treats the voice as a tool that influences the attention and the whole body: two singers in a horizontal position interpret a work by slowing its tempo to the maximum. The recital evolves into a physical ritual, akin to a trance.
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Titre
Onze Pianos
Onze Pianos (Eleven Pianos) is presented here in a version with two modified pianos reduced to three and six notes per octave; they are part of a series of eleven constrained pianos, reminiscent of the scores and compositional rules of György Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata. The instruments can be played by the visitor; they bring unusual and confusing constraints to normal piano playing.
