13.9.2023, Mittwoch 20:30 Uhr
Open Air Screening: Playing to the birds
Ort:
- Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin
Web:
- mehr Infos
Annika Kahrs – Playing to the birds, 2013, 14 min
Performer: Lion Hinnrichs
In the baroque-styled hall of Jenisch Haus in Hamburg, the pianist Lion Hinrichs plays Franz Liszt’s Legends No. 1: Francis of Assisi’s Sermon to the Birds (1863) to an audience of domesticated songbirds – an inverse dawn chorus, so to speak. Liszt’s composition uses trills and high notes to conjure the sound of an entire flock of birds. While Liszt tried to musically imitate the ‘language’ of birds for the human ear with his virtuoso staccatos, here, birds listen to a human interpretation of their language. This audience does not hold still in reverent silence and concentration before the performance begins nor does it comply with its intended end. Rather, it amplifies the conversation it conducted during the piano concert, cheerfully twittering on in the gallery where it has taken its place. Various forms of sonic communication are played back on, cross and overlap each other. With affectionate irony, Annika Kahrs takes the songbirds out of their role as musical protagonists and turns them into listeners to a musical performance of their own mode of communication. Playing to the Birds inquires into mechanisms of communication, translation and interpretation.
Also see Annika Kahrs’s solo exhibition Gravity’s Tune at Schering Stiftung , 14 SEP—27 NOV 2023