Above: Sample from Leighton Pierce’s ‘Threshold of Affinity.’
Leighton Pierce, dean of CalArts School of Film/Video, presents his latest site-specific work at the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kochi, India, which opens on Dec. 12.
Threshold of Affinity is a 14-video channel, 28-audio channel video installation that Pierce custom curated for a long and narrow room in the Pepper House, one of the Biennale’s venues. The room, lined with 14 vertically mounted displays, emphasizes a bodily relationship to time.
From the Artist’s Statement:
Just as our bodily markers of time constantly vary in rhythm and phase, in Threshold of Affinity, each individual video or sound element vibrates to its own variable clock. Within the room, recognized repetition (a factor of memory) sets up another layer of rhythm. And within the room there remains a common pulse among all the elements—too fast to be thought of as a rhythm, it becomes an underlying temporal texture. These relationships among the 14 screens amplify or attenuate this sense of bodily time in the viewer as they move through the space guided by sound and image.
Threshold of Affinity is a specific manifestation of a performance that adapts to the unique contingencies of each exhibition. For the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Pierce maximizes the potential of Threshold of Affinity, designing it for a 100 x 15 foot room with 16 curtained windows, a peaked terracotta ceiling, and wood floors. The ambient exterior sounds of life in Fort Kochi that enter and affect this space are anticipated and integrated by Pierce into the acoustic design. The video and audio elements become the media with which he paints the architectural space. Each future incarnation of this project will be uniquely configured within the architectural and infrastructural constraints of each venue. The visual and auditory content will change and evolve as well as repeat and reflect past incarnations of this work.
Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which began in 2012, is India’s largest contemporary art exhibition held every two years in Fort Kochi, Kerala, India. The Biennale’s third edition, which runs through March 29, 2017, is curated by acclaimed Indian artist Sudarshan Shetty with the theme, ‘forming in the pupil of an eye.’
Event Details
Threshold of Affinity at Kochi-Muziris Biennale
Dec. 12 through March 29, 2017
Fort Kochi, Kerala, India
Free