Kurimanzutto is pleased to announce its first exhibition with artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. For this exhibition the artist will present Compass, 2009, a sculptural intervention that explores the threshold between sound, performance, drawing and sculpture.

Reducing the gallery’s exhibition space to half its normal height, a new horizontal level is introduced that re-conceptualizes the relationship between stage and audience.  In the space above, a dancer performs a cadenced choreography of sounds, speaking in a metrical language with his/her feet. Out of sight and beyond reach, the public cannot see but only hear, feel, or sense the sonic trace of a composition that unfolds above their heads.

A step, a walk, a leap, or a turn, take over the course of time, the form of circles, squares, lines, or other organic shapes.  Direction, speed, and distance traveled are all perceptually accessible.  Yet these sonic marks are simultaneously punctual and anachronistic, resisting to ground themselves in the unity of any figurative image. The visitors experience these sensations as the continuously changing map that is marked out by the dancer above.   Moreover, devoid of any particular image or specific reference, the sounds created conjure an array of affective associations that turn the otherwise empty exhibition space into a huge resonating chamber in which questions of presence and absence, appearance and disappearance, visibility and memory, orientation and disorientation, are evoked through the formal logic of the trace.

Jennifer Allora (born 1974, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (born 1971, Cuba) have been collaborating since 1995. They have been the subjects of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including presentations at Haus der Kunst, Munich; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Zurich; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago. They have also been included in group exhibitions such as 29th Bienal de Sao Paulo ; the 8th & 9th Lyon Biennales; Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night; 51st Venice Biennale; “Ailleurs/ Ici,” Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC Paris, “How Latitudes Become Form,” Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, and “Common Wealth,” Tate Modern. Their works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Centre Georges Pompidou, among others. Allora & Calzadilla are based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They will be representing the US in the 2011 Venice Biennale.