Opening: June 12, 2015
Exhibition Duration: June 13 – August 30, 2015
For her exhibition Design Office: Noise Name Paintings and Sculptures of Rock Bands That Are Broken Up at the Benaki Museum, Main Building, Kim Gordon has turned the long exhibition room at Museum into a hall of tribute to the bands that still exist and to the memory of those that broke up and that worked with jarring cacophony and other aspects of what is now called noise music.
The “Noise Paintings” symbolize and reify a very particular musical subculture, and thus, a web of references emerges between authorship, visualization and the reciprocal influences of multidisciplinary poetic communication. Both the paintings and the floor sculptures included in the exhibition are in a way oracular, as the words they display are orphaned from their intended context, existing in a pure visual language space, with no informational potential beyond their imagistic and contextual.
A recording of Gordon’s performance as Body/Head (with Bill Nace) from the opening night of the exhibition becomes the soundtrack to the show.
For the past thirty years, Gordon has worked consistently across disciplines and across distinct cultural fields: art, design, writing, fashion (X-Girl), music, and film/video (both an actress and director). Kim Gordon’s art has been shown internationally including exhibitions at 303 Gallery, New York; Künstlerhaus, Graz and Gagosian, Los Angeles, among others. A widely recorded musician, Kim Gordon is a founding member of Sonic Youth and performs as Body/Head (with Bill Nace). Gordon’s highly anticipated memoir, titled ‘Girl in a Band’, was released in February 2015 on Dey Street Books.
The exhibition is part of the collaboration between the DESTE Foundation and the Benaki Museum, which aims to promote new and radical developments in contemporary art through a series of solo and group contemporary art exhibitions hosted at the museum.
Organized by the DESTE Foundation in collaboration with the Benaki Museum
Permanent Communication Sponsors of the Benaki Museum:
