Laurie Anderson exhibition

A multifaceted being. She is a composer, performer, author, activist, filmmaker. And also, a pioneer in electronic music, a talent that brought her wider international recognition. Laurie Anderson is a legendary figure in avant-garde art. She uses timeless expressions such as voice, painting or charcoal drawings, resulting in narratives that interweave observations on the human condition, the dreams of nations, the vision of the future. All this can be seen in different parts of the artist’s multifaceted production. 
For those who are curious, and are planning a visit to the city of Malmö, Sweden, we invite you visit the exhibition Absent in the Present: Looking into a Mirror Sideways, 1975, at the Moderna Museet, until September 03, 2023, an exhibition authored by curator Lena Essling. 

In 2016 she received the Yoko Ono Courage Award for the Arts for her work Habeas Corpus

«Where are we? What is time? Who owns history?» are existential questions the exhibition seeks to answer with the artist’s selection of works, including performance, photography and video. In parts of her works, Anderson questions the subject and its identity, the roles we take on and we are given. 
Laurie was born into a family of eight children in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, USA. She studied painting and played the violin in the Chicago youth orchestra. In 1966 she moved to New York, where she studied sculpture with minimalist and conceptual artist Sol LeWiltt. She has collaborated with artistic music pioneers, such as Philip Glass and John Cage and musician and producer Brian Eno. In addition, she has published several books and released seven albums, including Big Science, with O Superman, which became an international hit. Anderson is an artist in residence at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML) and teaches poetry at Harvard University.

Anderson received a Grammy in 2018

In the following lines, we will introduce you to the exhibition:
Instruments and Performance: the voice and music have been the basis of the artist’s work since the 1970s, so speaking, pausing, listening are essential to her compositions and performances, which are influenced by geometry and the language and sounds of everyday life. Over the years she has combined music with performance, film and technical innovation, resulting in multimedia theatre productions such as United States I-IV (1983) or the opera Moby Dick (1999). 
Language and Memory: an aficionado of written and narrative work, she has always shown an interest in language and media. For Anderson, «language is a self-generating system, which we never fully control, because it plays us like an instrument». This moment of the exhibition aims to present how today’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) is able to automatically generate texts from different sources, mimicking individual tone and style. And the way we choose our words, in particular moments, or the way we narrate an experience, shapes our memory and identity. This is why part of the works in this room represent the artist’s perceptions on the power of words. 

Persona: Laurie looked at 1960s and 1970s New York as a turbulent and creative environment, which she later came to compare with the vibrations of 1920s Paris. Inspired by the international Fluxus movement, and highlighting ideas that went beyond traditional art objects, the street became her studio. Some of Anderson’s early works were sculptures in simple materials attached to the body. For example, When You We’re Hear is a sound sculpture that can only be tested by the person touching it. 
To The Moon: in collaboration with Taiwanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang, this room shows an individual human journey between life and death. Freedom, adventure and pilgrimage are present in the space. A portrait of human capacity concerning the transition from dream to a rational and scientific worldview alongside spiritual beliefs. In this room, the artist uses Virtual Reality (VR) technology that transports us to a place beyond the physical world. Whoever undergoes the experience makes a passage across the enigmatic surface of the moon, with references to Greek mythology, literature, science, cinema and politics. In 2002, Anderson was invited to be the first resident artist of US space agency NASA.

Laurie has curated several major festivals, including the Vivid Festival in Sydney (2010) and the Meltdown Festival at the Royal Festival Hall in London (1997)

Time and Body: after 9/11, Laurie staged a demonstration, along with Mohammed el Gharani (born in 1986). The story of a young prisoner, accused of planning a terrorist attack at the age of 12, who was in Guantanamo Bay Prison, and was released and deported to the US in 2009. The title of the work, Habeas Corpus, is a message for protection from arbitrary imprisonment. In 2015, during a show with Anderson, the ‘young man’ told his story. The work highlights how politics can turn individuals into pawns in a game, when their identity is stolen from them, no amount of time or memory can erase that. The artist has been creating talking sculptures, species of analogue holograms. 
Ark: the artist speaks to understand the world. In her story she conveys her experiences, which are also based on literary works, mythology and science. One piece of that story is portrayed in her latest opera Ark, which is scheduled to premiere in 2024 in the city of Manchester. A work based on the story of Noah’s Ark. Various historical figures and phenomena, as well as contemporaries from art appear in this epic, where there are more questions than answers. 
And now we ask ourselves: are we left with the desire to see and think. Absent in the present?