This October in partnership with the Consulate General of Sweden in New York, Scandinavia House is pleased to present performances and a discussion by the celebrated artist-duo Lundahl & Seitl! In today’s program, the artists will perform their acclaimed piece Symphony of a Missing Room over a series of 30-minute increments running between 11:30 AM and 1:30 PM and resuming from 4 to 5:30 PM; at 1:30 PM, the program will also include a discussion between the artists and noted curator Barbara London. Reservations to both events must be made in advance; register for the timed performances here or at the link above, and click here to register for the artist discussion at 1:30 PM.

Since its inception in 2009 at the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm, Lundahl & Seitl’s work has been hosted by twentyfold internationally renowned museums and Biennials; earlier commissions have included Martin-Gropius-Bau, Royal Academy of Arts, Momentum 8 – Tunnel Vision, Centre Pompidou Metz, MMK Frankfurt, S.M.A.K, Bern Biennale and Kochi Muziris Biennale. In the performances, participants wear white goggles that induce a spatial white-out, partly rendering sensory interface to the world incomplete, and partly enabling a new relationship with the surroundings by blurring the distinction between sensing/reasoning, and body/mind. A guiding hand gradually earns our trust, while a whisper in the ear synchronizes our movement and breathing with the architectural sound in the headphones, closing the sensorial loop between our body and the imagined space through a reversed engineering of the vision. Today’s performances and discussion at Scandinavia House will conclude a North American tour as Artists-in-Residence at MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, MA), House of Sweden (Washington, DC) and ONX Studio (New York, NY).

The iteration of Symphony of a Missing Room at Scandinavia House emerged from the latest public showing of the work at Temple of Alternative Histories at Kassel Stadtteater, in conjunction with Documenta Fifteen. Building from an internal exercise on how to become a river, of shaping and being shaped by different topographies, the work echoes natural processes in a practice of extending one’s sensory experience into one’s surroundings and merging with it through the relationship.

In Symphony of a Missing Room, the value of agency and guidance is constantly negotiated in a dance of listening, adapting, and responding, not only to the immediate movement of your unseen guide but also to the objects and events from the past that have been integrated into the works’ choreographic score. As triggers for future experiences, these objects and events are now surfacing and played out horizontally in the present relationship and friction between visual and auditory organs and the nerves of the skin between the two bodies temporarily becoming the artwork. A multitude of ideas, experiences, thoughts, and reflections echoes inside the Symphony as an endless conversation between presences and absences.

Registration required; reserve a timed slot for performances here. Learn more and register for the 1:30 PM artist discussion here.

About Lundahl & Seitl

Lundahl & Seitl, formed in 2003 as continuous research into the question of how we perceive reality and negotiate its various forms. The virtual experience in their works is created with peculiar objects such as sightless goggles or methods of choreographed touch through reverse engineering visual stimuli. Through a heuristic relationship to process, and created in collaboration between disciplines, the duo has developed an art form and method containing staging, choreographed movement, instructions, sculpture, spatial sound, and augmented and virtual reality.

Their works and projects have been exhibited in museums and institutions such as the Gropius-Bau / Berliner Festspiele, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE), Tate Britain (UK), Royal Academy of Art (UK), 66th Avignon Festival (FR), Centre Pompidou Metz (FR), 8th Momentum Biennale (NO), and the Kochi Muziris Biennale (IN)

The duo is the recipient of a number of awards including an STRP ACT Award, the Stockholm Art Prize, Birgit Cullberg Stipend, IASPIS Grant holder, Montblanc Young Directors Award, Edstrandska Stipend for Contemporary Art, and Sven Harrys Art Prize Stipend and shortlisted for the Lumen Prize.

Lundahl & Seitl are supported by Nordisk Kulturfond, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee and the International Program for Visual Artists (iaspis), Stockholm Stad and Kulturrådet Sweden / Swedish Arts Council.

About ONX

ONX is both an extension of Onassis Athens’ Digital and Innovation Program and a structure that supports New York and the international digital and artistic ecosystem. ONX exists as a hybrid production and exhibition space for XR artists – artists working to extend reality, not just in extended reality. ONX acts as a hub within a dynamic global ecosystem of new practices and ideas – supporting the development, execution and mobility of new work in the digital arena.

In particular, ONX acts as an active bridge between NYC and Athens in the area of digital and XR practice.  ONX focuses on supporting the work of artists, and their trajectory – with production support, presentation opportunity and promotion in NYC and globally.