Screening & Performance
January 10, 2016, 3pm
Marking the final day of the Union Gaucha Productions survey at Artists Space Books & Talks, musician Lukas Ligeti will perform in response to – as well as structurally interve in – Phantom Limb (1998), the first collaborative film by Karin Schneider and Nicolás Guagnini.
The black and white, silent 16mm film Phantom Limb began with a trip by Schneider and Guagnini to film the artworks of Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland. The resulting work assumes the guise of a fictional documentary on the distinctive development of modernism in three countries supposedly "peripheral" within the art historical canon—Poland, Brazil, and Argentina.
Lukas Ligeti is a composer and performer in percussion and electronics. His music is informed by a unique and polyphonic approach to rhythm, and draws from eclectic electronic, acoustic, traditional, avant-garde, European, American, and African influences and collaborations.
Ligeti's compositions have been commissioned by Bang on a Can, the Kronos Quartet, Ensemble Modern, the American Composers Orchestra, the Vienna Festival, Goethe Institute, Armitage Gone! Dance, and many others. Most recently, he was artist-in-residence at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. As a drummer, he has worked with John Zorn, Marilyn Crispell, Gary Lucas, John Tchicai, Henry Kaiser, Miya Masaoka, Benoît Delbecq, Michael Manring, Tarek Atoui, Thollem McDonas, etc., and co-leads the trio Hypercolor with Eyal Maoz and James Ilgenfritz. He has given solo electronic percussion concerts on four continents. Active in experimental collaboration in Africa for more than 20 years, he co-founded the ensemble Beta Foly in Côte d'Ivoire and co-leads Burkina Electric, the first electronica band from Burkina Faso.
Ligeti studied composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria, his city of birth. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and subsequently lived in New York City from 1998 until 2015. He now divides his time between Southern California, where he teaches at the University of California, Irvine, and South Africa, where he is completing a PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Among other prizes, he received, in 2010, the CalArts Alpert Award in Music.
Union Gaucha Productions is supported by the Friends of Artists Space and the Union Gaucha Productions Exhibition Supporters Circle: Miguel Abreu; Bortolami Gallery; and Begum Yasar, Dominique Lévy Gallery.
