Join us for a collaborative musical event celebrating the 2008 Biennial, built as a disarticulation and recirculation of the images, words, and spaces of the exhibition. John Kennedy, Molly Sturges and Chris Jonas will compose a piece for multiple ensembles placed throughout the installation space, involving members of Santa Fe New Music and other musicians from the area. The performers will be linked using various compositional means to explore the realms of ephemerality, collaboration and process.

In certain Oceanic traditions, malangan are funerary effigies or monuments to the dead. Mourners make these assemblages of wood or woven vines and decorate the surface with carvings of animals, birds, shells, and human figures. The perishable monument is placed over a human grave as a marker, then left to decompose, and after the human soul is understood to have left the body, the remains are gathered to fertilize gardens.

It is through this metaphor of a ceremony to commemorate the dead that the artists hope to share the transformative powers of decay and revitalization—and in the context of the Biennial—accommodating simultaneous resonances of death and rebirth, of loss and renewal, of closure and new beginnings.