Diana Thater: Yes, there will be singing
David Zwirner is pleased to present a new video installation by the Los Angeles–based artist Diana Thater. The third presentation in the gallery’s Offsite series, this new sound, video, and light piece will be installed by the artist in a remote location and can only be experienced digitally, via a multichannel livestream video feed on the David Zwirner website. The title of the show refers to a poem by Bertolt Brecht, written while the playwright was in exile in Denmark in the late 1930s after having fled Nazi Germany. It reads: “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing / About the dark times.”
Since emerging in the early 1990s, Thater has pioneered the use of film, video, light, and sound, continually challenging the boundaries of time-based media and installation art. Her work explores the relationship between the natural and man-made worlds while critically examining the structures of mediated reality. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior sciences, mathematics, chess, and sociology, her evocative works directly engage their surroundings, producing an intricate relationship between time and space.