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Ballroom presented Music for Earth Day on April 22, 2022. As part of our 2022 exhibition, Kite Symphony, this gathering brought together seven artists to perform in honor of Earth Day. The artists invited listeners to immerse themselves in the sonic landscape of the exhibition, which then further expanded into Ballroom’s courtyard with sunset shows and live-score performances of Star Scores at the Marfa Visitor Center.

The audience joined us in Ballroom’s courtyard with Roberto Carlos Lange, widely known as Helado Negro, who performed a selection of songs that were primarily recorded at Marfa Recording Company during the pandemic. Lange then performed a live rendition of Kite Symphony, Four Variations, originally commissioned by Ballroom and named by ​​Pitchfork as one of the top 16 ambient albums of 2020. The presentation continued with sunset performances from interdisciplinary artist, impovisor, and opera singer Li(sa E.) Harris, and multidisciplinary artist, composer, percussionist & producer Jamire Williams.

The evening continued at the Marfa Visitor Center with Star Scores, a film commissioned by Ballroom. Live scores were performed by noted electronic artists Jace Clayton, Lori Scacco, and experimental washboard percussionist Newman Taylor Baker with new sounds from his Washboard XT project. The film, installed in Ballroom’s north gallery,  was created by Kristi Sword on 16mm film and later digitized, and features handmade animations of stars orbiting, splitting and multiplying through an imaginary celestial space, inspired by the dark skies of West Texas.

On April 22, 2022, we released Kite Symphony, Four Variations on vinyl in a limited edition of 100.

Admission for all events was free.

Ballroom Marfa presents Kite Symphony, a multidisciplinary exhibition by Roberto Carlos Lange and Kristi Sword. The project features a newly commissioned film, outdoor composition and installation, a series of drawings, sculpture, animation, and a special Earth Day performance. Sound is the throughline between these diverse elements of this long-term project. Lange is a musician (widely known as Helado Negro) and Sword is a visual artist, and Kite Symphony is an extension of their collaborative practice where they create work at the intersection of music, performance, and visual art.

Invited by Ballroom in March 2020 for a production trip for Kite Symphony, then a short film with a live score, Lange and Sword found themselves in West Texas at the onset of a global pandemic and mandates to socially isolate. The artists elected to remain in Marfa and with Ballroom’s support, extended their trip into a six-month residency. Their experience was the catalyst for Ballroom Sessions—The Farther Place, a residency program developed to support cross-disciplinary artists and musicians. As their time in Marfa extended Kite Symphony expanded into a full-scale exhibition, including new installation works, a community sound piece, performance, and four new experimental compositions released through Ballroom’s Bandcamp. Pitchfork called this album a “free-flowing collage that doubles as a snapshot of the project’s sprawl” and named it one of the top 20 ambient albums of 2020. The album features contributions from noted local musicians Jeanann Dara and Rob Mazurek, led by Sword’s meditative and meticulous visual scores.

Guided by the wind and inspired by their day-to-day experiences with the local landscape, Lange and Sword centered a practice of listening to produce new work. Their listening took many forms: they utilized meditative practices to tune their bodies into the sonic environment; they employed field recording to capture and amplify ephemeral or barely audible sounds like wings of insects and the wind itself; and they launched an open call to the community to hear the sounds of the town through the ears of locals. Lange recounts, “When you have your headphones on and a microphone pointing out to the expanses surrounding Marfa you’re surprised with the density of the air. It’s like a big blanket wraps your head and you’re invited into another world.” 

The exhibition at Ballroom features an impressionistic film, which explores the imperceptible forces that shape the West Texas landscape. The video documents the artists’ observations and experiments with wind and light interacting with kites, hand-made mylar instruments, found objects, and native plant materials. Lange and Sword turn their gaze upwards in Star Scores, a piece of visual music that reflects on the region’s dark skies through hand-made animations of galaxies orbiting, multiplying, and expanding through an imaginary celestial space. Adjacent are Sword’s ink drawings of rhythmic and repetitive brush marks, revealing a continuous evolution of a landscape in constant motion. Ballroom’s courtyard will be transformed into a listening space where Lange presents a new sonic installation composed of the sounds collected from the community. Taken together, all of these newly commissioned works heighten the audience’s sense of space by attuning us to expansive new sonic geographies, helping us to listen in diverse ways, and reminding us of our presence in a living world.

On Earth Day, April 22, 2022, Ballroom will host a day of performances with Roberto Carlos Lange and several of his musical collaborators. The show will feature live renditions of Star Scores, a performance of Kite Symphony, Four Variations with a live ensemble, and performances by several friends of the artists, with the full lineup to be announced in early 2022.

Kite Symphony is organized by Sarah Melendez, Ballroom Marfa music curator.

Roberto Tejada gives a virtual walkthrough of Donna Huanca: ESPEJO QUEMADA. He shares insights about the exhibition and Huanca’s use of language, materiality and collage. Tejada also offers references that the artworks conjure including pre-colonial cosmologies and figures such as Ana Mendieta and Gloria Anzaldúa.

Join Marcela Guerrero, Jennifer Rubio Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Daisy Nam, Curator at Ballroom Marfa, in conversation on the work of Donna Huanca in this virtual talk. The two will discuss Donna Huanca: ESPEJO QUEMADA, as well as Guerrero’s work on influential recent exhibitions of contemporary art from Latin America, including the exhibitions Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 at the Hammer Museum.

This program is presented in collaboration with ArtTable.

Registration is open now. Tickets are $10 for Ballroom audiences with the code ATxBMFriend. Student tickets are $5 with the code ATxBMStudent.

Extended Gallery Hours

As part of Chinati Weekend’s Made in Marfa celebration, Ballroom Marfa extends gallery hours on Friday, October 8 to experience the current exhibition, DONNA HUANCA: ESPEJO QUEMADA. Refreshments provided in the Courtyard. Advance reservations recommended. Schedule a visit here. For the safety of our extended Marfa community, we ask all visitors to mask and social distance while inside the gallery.

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Ballroom joins forces with Summer Shake Up for DJ Camp 2021, offered by Marfa ISD in collaboration with several community partner organizations. This year’s DJ Camp will be a vinyl-only workshop led by members of the Chulita Vinyl Club ATX for Marfa students in grades five through eight.

The workshop is designed to engage the imagination of youth from all musical backgrounds. Students will be encouraged to use found music and images to create their own narratives, celebrating personal history and cultural exploration. Throughout the week, students will learn and practice beat-matching, mixing, scratching, and more. While offering practical experience with turntables and vinyl records, The Chulita Vinyl Club ATX also presents DJing as an art form with a rich culture and history, with portions of each class covering the history of DJ culture, music collectives, basic music theory, and an introduction to zine-making.

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Join Knowledge of Wounds for a conversation between Kim TallBear & Daniel Browning on October 20 at 7pm CST.

In this keynote conversation, Dr. TallBear will speak with Bundjalung journalist Daniel Browning on her work on critical non-monogamy. TallBear situates her critique of the assumed, settler-imposed norms of dyadic coupledom and marriage within the Indigenous ethics of Right Relationship. In her work, TallBear traces a compelling line between the strategic imposition of colonial familial structures and sexual mores and the seizure and partitioning of land. In critical dialogue with the work of white ecofeminists such as Annie Sprinkle, TallBear proposes an expanded understanding of erotic relationship and intimate committment that includes both human and more-than-human relations. TallBear both references and refutes the existing formulations of Polyamory, troubling the overwhelming whiteness and neoliberal underpinnings of these movements, and instead makes an argument for the practice of non-monogamy and non-hierarchical intimacy as restorations of our relational sovereignty.

 

In anticipation of International Dawn Chorus Day, the worldwide celebration of nature’s greatest avian symphony, Ballroom Marfa is presenting Birdscapes Radio. This freeform program will center on Frye’s ever-evolving collaborative, sonic exploration into the world of birds. Listeners can expect to hear down-tempo dawn chorus, historical recordings, rare sounds, and seabird colonies hosted by Rob Frye and Sarah Melendez, with guests Edbrass Brasil, Cristian Pinto, Martin Frye, Satya Gummuluri and more. The show will also include excerpts from “Experience the Birds,” the first episode of Maui Nui Seabirds: Mauka to Makai, and Rob’s performative lecture “Hearing Hidden Melodies.”

Birdscapes was originally realized as a video collaboration between Chilean artist Martin Kaulen and Frye, who met while touring with their respective bands Watch Out! and Bitchin Bajas in 2014. Years later, Kaulen coined the term “birdscape” while describing a video he made in which bird’s flight paths are traced, yielding an inexhaustible source of tracks and lines. Frye provided the musical accompaniment “In the Air Like Clouds’’ for the video, and while visiting Kaulen in Paris in 2018, the two hosted a “Birdscapes Sound Happening” at Chez Adel. They mixed Frye’s process of slowing down bird song and flute with Kaulen’s technique of using piezo transducers to amplify these sounds through resonant physical objects, such as the tables, chairs, windows, and a piano.

Birdscapes Radio will be streamed on Ballroom Marfa’s website on May 1st to encourage people to listen to the world of birdsong with a musician’s ear.

This project was organized by Ballroom Marfa Programs Director Sarah Melendez.

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Please note: visitors are invited for outdoor screenings of Chang’s film (12 min, looped), projected onto Ballroom’s exterior at sundown (8:30pm – 10pm), Wednesday through Sunday, April 9–25. Masks and social distancing are required. 

Ballroom Marfa selected Patty Chang’s Invocation for a Wandering Lake: Parts 1 & 2 (2016) for the 2021 season of Artists’ Film International (AFI). The work calls for contemplation of human and non-human lives, the natural environment, and destructive geopolitical forces, as we witness the artist in ritual acts of care and mourning.

The lifeless body of a whale floats off the coast of Newfoundland’s Fogo Islands, a former fishing hub. The artist Patty Chang is seen meditatively washing the deceased animal. With similar attention, she scrubs the shell of an abandoned ship in the desert of Muynak, Uzbekistan, a defunct seaport on the receded Aral Sea. These repetitive acts seem almost absurd and unnecessary, as these entities could never return to life. Nevertheless, she continues to perform rituals of care, perhaps as a way to process their fateful ends.

Over the last year, we collectively experienced extreme loss due to the ongoing pandemic. If we are to create new ways of living, perhaps we first need to practice ways of mourning, mending, and contemplating through rituals of care, as the film suggests.

Organized in conjunction with Whitechapel Gallery in London, Artists’ Film International (AFI) is a program that showcases international artists working in film, video and animation. Every year all participating institutions nominate a moving-image work from an artist living and working in their country. This year, all film nominations are tied together around the theme of care.

On April 6, join curator Daisy Nam and Marfa artist Ester Partegàs in conversation in conjunction with Texas Talks Art.

Texas Talks Art is a multi-institutional initiative intended to both introduce the work of artists across the state of Texas to a wider audience and to foster collaboration between local nonprofit arts organizations. Taking the form of virtual 30-minute lunchtime talks, the series features 50 Texas artists in conversation with 50 Texas curators beginning in January 2021 and continuing throughout the year. Texas Talks Art is built on a belief in the need to work collectively to support the remarkable and diverse community of artists living and working in Texas. The series features an intergenerational roster of artists working across mediums and at differing points in their careers. The program encourages dialogue between art workers and emphasizes the broad range of concerns and questions that animate Texas-based artists. Learn more on the Texas Talks Art website.