Please join us to celebrate the opening of Read Me As You Wish, a new exhibition by Ivan Mršić accompanied by a series of live responses by experimental artists and musicians, details for which can be found below.
This project has been developed during Ivan’s time as an Artist in Residence at the Audio Foundation.
In Read Me As You Wish, Ivan Mršić presents a series of paintings and static projections that in turn inspire compositional reflections and improvisational live responses by members of Tāmaki Makaurau’s experimental music community.
Drawing inspiration from the history of graphic scores – visual representations of sound using means other than formal notation – and the shifting and illuminating relationship between images and sound, this project invites viewers and respondents to read front to back as well back to front, left to right as well as right to left, circling forward and backward as they feel.
Anchored in a practice of collaboration, members of Vitamin S will be randomly drawn into unique trios and will musically respond to Mršić’s projected paintings. These trios form a real time spontaneous form of collaborative creativity that is open to exploration, enabling the articulation of thought, and for feeling to be expressed and experienced together.
Opens: Tuesday 18 April, 5.30pm, with refreshments by Liberty Breweries and Decibel Wines
Hours: 12 – 4pm, Tuesday – Saturday
Performances: 7 – 8pm, Wednesday 19 & 26 April, and 7 – 8pm, Wednesday 3 & 10 May
Closes: Saturday 13 May with live performance by Simon O’Rorke, Jeff Henderson, Ivan Mršić, Francesca Parussini, Kat Tomacruz and Parks
Read Me As You Wish Performance Schedule
Performances will happen weekly, with two trios performing every Wednesday for the duration of the show. Ivan Mršić will also present new instruments for some of the collaborators to play for the first time.
Wednesday 19 April, 7 – 8pm
Trio 1: Paul Buckton Joshua Taylor, Tim Sutton
Trio 2: Kristian Larsen, Steve Cournane, Adam Rotgans
Wednesday 26 April, 7 – 8pm
Trio 1: Anna Fält, Drew McMillan, Eamon Edmundson-Wells
Trio 2: Hermione Johnson, Rosie Langabeer, Reuben Jelleyman
Wednesday 3 May, 7 – 8pm
Trio 1: Sean Martin-Buss, Nigel Gavin, Callum Passells
Trio 2: Liam Bowen, Joel Vinsen, Tash van Schaardenburg
Wednesday 10 May, 7 – 8pm
Trio 1: Phil Dadson, Maurice Reviol, Darren Hannah
Trio 2: Chris O’ Connor, John Radford, Kevin Kim
Closing Performance
Saturday 13 May, from 8pm
Simon O’Rorke, Jeff Henderson, Ivan Mršić, Parks, and more
Artist Bio:
Ivan Mršić is an interdisciplinary visual artist, percussionist, composer and improviser who’s long running practice builds on the foundations of avant-garde music, performance, experimentation and art. He has a Master of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, and studied percussion at the Conservatory of Music, Montreux, Switzerland.
His practice operates on the assumption that virtually anything can become a musical instrument under certain conditions. This expanded understanding of sculpture, sound, music and musical instruments has led Mršić to work with discarded everyday objects, fascinated to explore their sonic potential. His research and ingenuity has led to the creation of a number of unique instruments (“Theareye Collection”), including his iconic ‘kitchen sink with springs’ that lends a signature sound to his compositions. He and his instruments are regular performers and collaborators at Vitamin S (Auckland’s weekly improvised music gathering) and at many of New Zealand’s significant improvised music events such as the 2010 Sound Invention Convection Festival.
Mršić’s abstract video animations explore the relationship between sound and image and have been shown internationally in galleries and at animation festivals, notably across the 90 metre facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. Combining his interests in sound and moving images, The Projection Band was founded in 2009. With this experimental impro-noise group Mršić has performed throughout Aotearoa and at the Ganz Novi Festival in Zagreb, Croatia in 2015.
In 2016 Mršić developed the project Kakokarangaphonia, a time-scored orchestra of noise, for the Te Tuhi exhibition Share/Cheat/Unite, which was recognised with an award of excellence at the Museums Aotearoa Conference. Unique versions of the piece were later performed at the Christchurch Art Gallery and Te Papa Museum before being performed in South Korea, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia. In addition to his own works, Mršić has also composed sound for short films and for et.al.’s artworks ‘De-cryption’ 2013 commissioned by the Auckland Art Gallery for the exhibition Freedom Farmers and ‘Trans– cryption’ 2011. Recently he has collaborated with many artists, musicians and dancers, and with Kristian Larsen formed duo AileronS.