A still from a video by Diana Thater titled, Yes there will be singing.
A still from a video by Diana Thater titled, Yes there will be singing.

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.

 

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Dates
October 14November 28, 2020

 

Diana Thater

 

 

 

Yes,

there will be singing

 

 

Please use headphones or external speakers.

Exhibition overview of  Yes, there will be singing ,  October 14-November 28, 2020.

 

 

Yes,

there will be singing is a new sound,

video and light piece by Diana Thater that can only be experienced digitally,

via a multichannel livestream video feed on the David Zwirner website. 

 

The exhibition’s title 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.

 

—Bertolt Brecht

 

Exhibited by the artist in a remote location,

accessible twenty-four hours a day,

the installation centers audio recordings of the distinctive songs of “Whale 52,”

either a deaf,

male blue whale or a hybrid of fin and blue whales,

who has been identified only by the unique pitch of his vocalizations,

pulsing at fifty-two hertz.

 

Whale 52 sings alone;

The work begins and ends with his deep,

solo hum,

a song never answered by other whales.

 

This bass underlines the louder and higher calls of humpback whales singing to one another.

 

The remote space,

filled with sound,

light,

and the necessary equipment,

is in an analogue for their rich,

underwater world.

 

The installation meditates on the voice in space,

its unanswered call,

and the necessity of communication and interrelation—even,

or especially,

when physical proximity is precluded.

 

In the dark times,

we must not stop singing.

Please use headphones or external speakers.

Closing Musical Performance featuring Mark Lightcap
Livestream recorded Saturday, November 28 | 12pm PST

 

October 14–November 28,

2020

 

 

David Zwirner Offsite

 

This project was made possible in part by the Art + Technology Lab at LACMA.

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