Organized by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (DSO)
DSO Music Director: Jaap Van Zweden
DSO President & CEO: Jonathan Martin
SOLUNA Director of Festival Advancement: Anna-Sophia Van Zweden
SOLUNA Curatorial Advisor: Muriel Quancard
From May 4 to 24 2015, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra led the presentation of SOLUNA, a new music and arts festival centered in the Dallas Arts District.
The Festival was anchored by orchestral performances and featured collaborations with Dallas art institutions; new works were commissioned to acclaimed visual artists inspired by the Festival theme.
Destination (America) was chosen as the theme of the inaugural festival to focus artistic cohesion and to provide a broad platform for multiple art forms.
The 20th century saw an explosion of creative talent globally and an extraordinary influx of composers, musicians, visual and performing artists from the Americas, Europe and Asia into the United States. The reasons for this migration largely mirrored the essential motivations that had driven millions to the United States for over two hundred years – opportunity, freedom of personal and artistic expression, refuge from war and oppression. The demographics of the United States originated from these migrations, and the shaped the cultural landscape.
Destination (America) was an opportunity for artists to explore the ideas of dislocation as result of migration, as well as the concept of home and belonging.
SOLUNA Festival Opening Performance, May 6, 2015
Three Short Films by Alex Prager
Musicians of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Dallas City Performance Hall
Co-curated with Anna-Sophie Van Zweden
Karina Canellakis leads the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in a live music performance accompanying the screening of three films by Alex Prager with music composed by Ali Helnwein.
Face in the Crowd (2013)
La Petite Mort (2012)
Despair (2010)
Celebrated for her meticulously constructed, theatrical, and richly cinematic images, Alex Prager, a Los Angeles-based artist, is inspired by a wide range of influences, from popular culture, to street photography, to the cinematic history of Hollywood. Prager’s distinctive style and dialogue with Hollywood found full expression in her Face in the Crowd series, which debuted at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2013 and was subsequently shown at Lehmann Maupin in New York in 2014. Prager managed large-scale sets, hundreds of extras, and a full production team to create precisely composed images of crowds. This series also includes a video installation starring the American actress Elizabeth Banks.
A free-channel video installation and a new body of photographs are concurrently exhibited at the Goss-Michael Foundation from May 8 to June 20, 2015.
About Face in the Crowd (2013)
Alex Prager is represented by Lehman Maupin
ReMix series: Hollywood Exile, May 8 & 9, 2015
World Premiere of a new film by Pipilotti Rist
Musicians of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Guest soloist Conrad Tao
Dallas City Performance Hall
Co-curated with Anna-Sophie Van Zweden
Karina Canellakis leads the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in a music program focused on early 20th century composers who came to America to escape rising Nazism. These composers – Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Korngold, Rozsa and others – found an outlet in Hollywood film while still continuing to write in the classical genre.
Acclaimed artist Pipilotti Rist was commissioned by SOLUNA to create a video to accompany the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Miklos Rozsa’s “Andante for Strings, Op. 22a." A Hungarian-born composer Rozsa’s immigrated to the United States in 1940 and became a prominent composer in the Hollywood film industry.
Pipilotti Rist’s video and audio installations blurs the boundaries between high art and popular culture, exploring the unfamiliar within the everyday. Her lush, seductive images recruits the idioms of advertising and music video to arrive at an idiosyncratic visual language that is informed by her experience as a musician and set designer.
Pipilotti Rist is represented by Luhring Augustine.
Pipilotti Rist & SOLUNA in Interview Magazine.
Symphony No. 3 (Bernstein) | Inferno (Bartana), May 14 & 16, 2015
Dallas Symphony Orchestra & Chorus | Children's Chorus of Greater Dallas
Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
Co-curated with Anna-Sophie Van Zweden
Yael Bartana’s film Inferno is screened prior to a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony No 3, which is based on the Jewish prayer for the dead. Composed in 1963, Kaddish is a choral and orchestral piece invoking the complex relationships between man and the divine, father and son, and addressing the limits of human power and control in a universal context. Kaddish’s libretto was be narrated by actor Ronald Guttman.
While their periods and approaches may differ, Bernstein and Bartana share several interests and ideas, and the juxtaposition of their voices suggested fresh perspectives on each work.
Yael Bartana’s films, installations and photographs explore the imagery of identity and the politics of memory. Her starting point is the national consciousness propagated by her native country Israel. Central to the work are meanings implied by terms like “homeland”, “return” and “belonging”. Bartana investigates these through the ceremonies, public rituals and social diversions that are intended to reaffirm the collective identity of the nation state.
'Inferno' refers to the construction of the third Temple of Solomon (Templo de Salmão) in São Paulo by a Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal Church. Built to biblical specifications, this new temple is a replica of the first temple in Jerusalem, the violent destruction of which signaled the diaspora of the Jewish people in the 6th century BCE. 'Inferno' confronts this conflation of place, history, and belief, providing insight into the complex realities of Latin America that have given rise to the temple project. Bartana’s film employs what she refers to as “historical pre enactment,” a methodology that commingles fact and fiction, prophesy and history. Her work addresses the grandiose temple project through a vision of its future: Does its construction necessarily foreshadow its destruction? Using a powerful cinematic language, 'Inferno' collapses histories of antiquity in the Middle East with a surreal present unfolding halfway around the world.
About Inferno (2013).
Yael Bartana is represented by Annet Gelink Gallery.
Black Rocker (2015), May 15, 2015
Performance by Kevin Beasley
Co-curated with Gavin Delahunty, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art; Curator Assistant: Chelsea Pierce
Dallas Museum of Art
SOLUNA and the Dallas Museum of Art commissioned Black Rocker, a sound site-specific and participative performance to Kevin Beasley for the museum’s Friday Late Night. Black Rocker emphasized the physicality of sound and explored the journey to American-ness through a culture dependent upon notions of blackness while celebrating the history of black music in America. It derived its name from the actual rocking chair used by Beasley during the six-hour long performance. This chair is accompanied by 24 bespoke seat cushions that Beasley equipped with microphones. The audience is able to interact with the artist in real time during the performance. This bold experiment harnesses the energies of the audience and transforms them into dynamic aural sensations.
On May 14, 2015 Gavin Delahunty and Kevin Beasley held a discussion at the Dallas Museum of Art on Beasley’s work and the political economy of music.
Kevin Beasley is represented by Casey Kaplan.
Destination, in Five Movements, May 24, 2015
Five new videos by Monte Laster, performances and video by students of Booker T. Washington High School for the Arts
Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
Co-curated with Anna-Sophie Van Zweden
Destination, in Five Movements is a participatory artwork made during three weeklong sessions over a six-month period. The final presentation, organized for Memorial Day on May 24, 2015 combines video with musical performances by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and other Dallas-based organizations in a grand public event at the Meyerson Symphony Center.
Monte Laster questions the roles of migration and displacement in the construction of identities and the formation of networks. His unique creative process, which brings individuals from diverse backgrounds into contact with one another, results in interactions that he captures in various ways. Whether they are installations, performances, photographs, or videos, Laster’s works are produced through a process of long-term collaboration.
Destination America: True Stories of Immigration, May 16, 2015
Collaboration between Oral Fixation, the Dallas Museum of Art Arts & Letters Live program and Monte Laster
Horchow Auditorium, Dallas Museum of Art
This special event showcases the power of the human spirit through seven immigrants and refugees sharing their stories of coming to America.
For SOLUNA, Laster engaged Dallas schools, such as Booker T. Washington High School and other local organizations, including Oral Fixation, in the creation of a socially conscious project.
Monte Laster was born in Fort Worth, Texas. Since 1994, he has been working within the community of La Cité des 4000 in La Courneuve, France, perhaps the most socially stigmatized housing project in France where in created the not-for-profit organization known as FACE (French American Creative Exchange).
Monte Laster and SOLUNA in Bomb Magazine.
Monte Laster and Oral Fixation in the Dallas Observer.
Monte Laster on KERA/NPR radio.
WCD (Washington Crossing the Delaware), May 23, 2015
Performance by Francisco Moreno
Warehouse in Trinity Groves
Co-curated with Anna-Sophie Van Zweden
WCD (Washington Crossing the Delaware) borrows its title from a painting by German artist Emanuel Leutze that was intended to inspire European revolutionaries. Dallas-based Mexican artist, Francisco Moreno reinterpretes this depiction of a symbolic American story in a performance involving a Japanese car—built by a company that contributed to that country’s participation in World War II—with an implanted American engine rebuilt from scratch by Mexican technicians.
About WCD (2015).
Francisco Moreno is represented by Erin Cluley Gallery.