Christian Marclay: acoustic objects

Christian Marclay will be in Beirut for a very special performance.

Musicians:
Christian Marclay: found objects, concept

With
Abed Kobeissy: buzuk
Sharif Sehnaoui: guitar
Special thanks to white cube gallery.

Christian Marclay was born in California, 1955. He works in a wide range of media, including sculpture, video, photography, collage, and performance. For more than 30 years, he has been exploring the connections between the visual and the audible; creating works in which these two distinct sensorial experiences enrich and challenge each other. Marclay’s work has been shown in museums and galleries internationally. He has had important one-person exhibitions at the Kunsthaus, Zurich (1997), museum of contemporary art, Chicago (2001), San Francisco Museum of modern art (2002), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010), and the garage center for contemporary culture, Moscow (2011). Marclay received the golden lion award for best artist at the 54th Venice Biennale for his 24-hour virtuosic video piece the clock, which was first shown at the white cube in London in 2010. Since then, the clock has been exhibited at a number of institutions worldwide including Paula cooper gallery (2011), the museum of modern art, New York (2012), San Francisco Museum of modern art (2013), and Guggenheim Bilbao (2014).

Sharif Sehnaoui is a free improvising guitarist. He plays both electric and acoustic guitars, with (or without) extended and prepared techniques, focusing on expanding the intrinsic possibilities of these instruments without the use of effects or electronics. He now resides in Beirut, his hometown, after more than a decade in Paris, where he started his career as an improviser in 1998, playing at instants chavirés where he was a member of several orchestras. he has since performed his music worldwide and played in many clubs and festivals such as soundfield (Chicago), Moers, konfrontationen (nickelsdorf), météo music festival (Mulhouse), ctm & maerzmusik (berlin), fest (Tunis), skanu mesz (Riga), 100live (Cairo) or musikprotokoll (Graz). In Lebanon, he actively contributed to the emergence of an unprecedented experimental music scene. Along with Mazen Kerbaj, he created in 2000 Irtijal, the first improvised and new music annual international festival in the Arab world. Irtijal celebrated its xvth anniversary in 2015. He also runs two record labels: al maslakh, devoted to ’publish the unpublishable on the Lebanese musical scene, and annihaya, focusing on sampling, recycling, and the displacement of various aspects of popular culture.

Abed Kobeissy’s main focus is composing original scores for film, theater productions, and dance performances, with the intent of introducing urban and contemporary sonic textures into Arabic musical aesthetics. He is a member of the asil ensemble for contemporary classical Arabic music, and a lecturer on the history and aesthetics of Arabic music at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.