Calumny (détail)
Installation, 2007
© Oswaldo Macià
By kind permission of the Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris

Calumny Surrounded in Tears Something Going on Above My Head
(Version française)

May 25 to August 24, 2008
Preview: May 25, 2008, 2 p.m.

The Musée d’art de Joliette (MAJ), in collaboration with he Festival of Lanaudière, invites you experience a call to the senses with the installations of the Colombian-born artist Oswaldo Macià. Calumny , presented in Gallery 3 of the MAJ, appeals both to the eye and to the olfactory sense. The viewer’s whole body responds to this multi-sensorial experience, which plays on our temporal and cultural perceptions by means of swinging pendulums and scents with an allegorical function that confuse the senses with their correspondences. Calumny was inspired by a lost painting of the same name executed by the Ancient Greek artist Apelles, which was minutely described by the architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise on painting De pictura, published in 1435. In collaboration with the perfume maker Ricardo Moya, Macià has created a variety of fragrances inspired by the original composition of the painting as described by Alberti. These scents are diffused through the gallery by five luminous globes that swing from side to side like giant censers. Unlike writing, which has been the principal way of transmitting learning down the centuries in most civilizations, Macià’s work has a new formula. From viewing, we perceive Calumny with our other senses. The aim of this approach is to expand the horizon of our perceptions.

Macià’s second installation, Surrounded in Tears, is a symphony that melds together about a hundred sounds of weeping recorded in different eras and many cultures. Incorporated into the MAJ’s permanent exhibition of religious art, the sounds are relayed by sixteen loudspeakers shaped like bells hanging among the works of sacred art. This lament permeates the whole gallery space, creating a shimmering beauty that is both mystical and terribly cruel. This blend of the aesthetic and the painful reminds us that despite its primary message of love, religion has often been the cause of suffering. Macià created this sound arrangement in collaboration with the English composer Michael Nyman, famous for his sound track to the film The Piano Lesson.

The exhibition extends outside the Museum with Macià’s installation Something Going on Above My Head and the show Le Musée en kit. Presented exclusively on the site of the Festival of Lanaudière, Something Going on Above My Head is a sound installation composed of almost 2,000 songs of birds from four continents. Recorded during five years of research in libraries and archives of ornithology, these songs, chirrups, hoots and warbling were chosen for their timbre and their easily recognizable tonal ranges and frequencies.

This sound installation is presented to honour the centenary of the birth of the composer Olivier Messiaen, celebrated for his studies of birdsong. Macià is sometimes compared to this great composer of classical music, but his interests are somewhat different. While Messiaen’s aim was to make the public aware of the world of birds, the birdsong modulated and orchestrated by Macià are intended to make visitors reflect on their own memories and past lives, stimulated by sounds familiar to them.

Presented along the paths leading to the amphitheatre on the site of the Festival of Lanaudière, this sculpture in sound is a unique opportunity to hear, all in one place, the songs of birds that would never otherwise meet.

Something Going on Above My Head has been presented in many international exhibitions, most notably in Venice at the 51st Biennale in 2005, > Haunch of Venison, London, 2004 ,at the Haunch of Venison in London in 2004 and at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2003.

Oswaldo Macià was born in 1960 in Cartagena, Colombia. After four years of studying art at the Studio Intermedio, he moved to Bogota, where he earned a degree in art history at the National University. He now lives and works in London. Always equipped with a tape recorder, the most vital tool for constructing his “sound sculptures”, he directs projects based on sound data bases.