Mudam commissioned this new performance dispersion of subjectivity to LABOUR, in collaboration with Les Percussions de Strasbourg. It unfolds as a sonic dramaturgy throughout Mudam’s spaces. Working site-specifically, the Berlin-based duo – consisting of Farahnaz Hatam and Colin Hacklander – enables innovative ways to approach the notion of ‘deep listening’ and observe their surroundings. The artists draw on psychoacoustics to explore how the museum’s architecture resonates with the visitor’s hearing capacity.
In the performance, musicians will shift positions while noise and music drift throughout the spaces. As the surfaces catch and reflect these sounds, Mudam turns into a resonant, multi-chambered music box that unsettles attempts to locate their source. The shimmering metallic tones of two sixxens – microtonal percussion instruments – anchor a sonic turbulence that oscillates between the identifiable and the unintelligible, the grounded and the piercing, the bright and the dark.
This hallucinatory composition is amplified by visual elements. Through an allegory and a profusion of signs, LABOUR playfully critiques the priority often given to sight above other senses – an entrenched bias since the advent of the written word – and asks whether we can trust what we see. Ultimately, dispersion of subjectivity tackles the embedded nature of events – the relationality between phenomena – questioning whether we truly perceive what we actually see and hear.
Organised by Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in collaboration with the 2025 rainy days festival of the Philharmonie Luxembourg and Luxembourg Art Week.
Curators: Léon Kruijswijk, assisted by Nicole Wittmann
⏰ Performance at 4pm
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