ALLORA & CALZADILLA

Opening Reception: Wednesday, July 13, 2016, 19:00–21:00
Exhibition Dates: July 13 –October 9, 2016
Opening Hours: Tuesday–Saturdays, 13:00-21:00, Sundays 11:00-19:00

Protocinema presents Allora & Calzadilla, with two video installations: The Great Silence, 2014 and Apotomē, 2013, at Alt Art Space. These two works focus on the roots of signification and reflect upon the sensory universe that lies beyond human grasp. Exploring the boundaries between what “is” and what “is not” the two films consider how that threshold is made perceptible by the “one” who chooses to construct it.

The Great Silence (2014), a three-channel video installation, focuses on the world's largest radio telescope, which transmits and captures radio waves to and from the farthest edges of the universe and is home to the SETI database that processes cosmic noise in attempt of finding and decoding possible messages of extraterrestrial intelligence. Located in Esperanza (Hope), Puerto Rico, it is also home to the last members of an endangered species of parrots, Amazona vittata. Allora & Calzadilla collaborated with science fiction author Ted Chiang on a subtitled script in the spirit of a fable that ponders the possibilities of communication as well as the irreducible gaps between living, nonliving, human, animal, technological, and cosmic actors.

The single channel video Apotomé borrows its title from the archaic Greek word referencing a musical interval—literally “what is cut off” in the original Pythagorean definition. In it, the singer Tim Storms, who is credited as having the lowest recorded voice in the world, intonates a subsonic version of a concert played in 1798 for two elephants brought to Paris as spoils of the Napoleonic Wars. The musical experiment was organized by conservatory musicians, who embodied a mix of Enlightenment and Revolutionary ideals, to test if music could be used as a means of communication with animals. Tim Storms sings while walking up and down aisles of taxidermy specimens in the storage room at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris until he finally arrives at the elephants’ skeletal remains. With his voice reaching octaves so low that animals only as large as elephants can hear it, he recasts a historic attempt of interspecies communication through music, in a register that probes the human threshold between the audible and the sensible.

During the third week of September, Allora & Calzadilla will give a talk about their work at Alt art space.

About the Artists Jennifer Allora (born 1974, Philadelphia) and Guillermo Calzadilla (born 1971, Havana) have collaborated on a conceptually rigorous body of work since 1995. Through a research-based approach, their work traces intersections of deep history, material culture, and politics through a wide variety of mediums, namely performance, sculpture, sound, video, and photography.

Their work has been exhibited and collected widely in public institutions and private collections. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at; Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada (2016); Dia Art Foundation, Guayanilla–Peñuelas, Puerto Rico (2015); Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fabric Workshop and Museum (2014); Trussardi Foundation, Milan (2013); Indianapolis Museum of Art (2012); the US Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); the Museum of Modern Art (2010); The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (2009); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2008); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2008); Serpentine Gallery, London (2007); Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich (2007) and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2007). Among numerous group exhibitions, they have participated in the “51st and 56thVenice Biennale (2005, 2015); Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012); the 5th, 7th, and 10th Gwangju Biennials, South Korea (2004, 2008, 2014); and the 24th and the 29th São Paulo Biennial (1998, 2010); and the Aichi Triennial, Japan, (2016). They are currently presenting the project Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos), Dia Art Foundation, Guayanilla–Peñuelas, Puerto Rico (until September 2017).

Allora participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1999, holds a BA from the University of Richmond and an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Calzadilla received his BFA from Escuela des Artes Plásticas, San Juan and MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, and studied at the Skowhegan School Painting and Sculpture.

Allora and Calzadilla live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico.