April 4, 2019 at Crow Museum of Asian Art

World Premiere (SOLUNA and Crow Museum of Asian Art Co-Commission) 

New York-based artist and composer Aki Onda will create a site-specific performance inspired by Jacob Hashimoto’s Nuvole installation and the Crow Museum’s permanent collection. Using light, sound, and other media, the complex relationship between the concrete and the ephemeral is explored. Featuring Queens-based vocal artist Samita Sinha.

AKI ONDA

Aki Onda is a New York-based artist and composer. He is particularly known for Cassette Memories — works compiled from a sound diary of field-recordings collected by using the Walkman over the last quarter-century. He creates compositions, performances and visual artworks from those sound memories. Onda often performs in interdisciplinary fields and collaborates with filmmakers, visual artists and choreographers, including Ken Jacobs, Takao Kawaguchi, Raha Raissnia, Michael Snow and Akio Suzuki. Onda’s work has been presented at numerous institutions such as Bozar, documenta 14, The Kitchen, Louvre Museum, MoMA, Palais de Tokyo, Pompidou Center and many others.

SAMITA SINHA

Samita Sinha combines tradition and experimentation to compose vocal performance works that investigate cultural inheritance and the experience of being a body in the world. Works include This ember state (2018, commissioned by Asia Society), bewilderment and other queer lions (2016, commissioned by Performance Space 122 and Invisible Dog Art Center for COIL Festival) and Cipher (2014-15), a solo work that toured nationally. She has composed and performed original scores for dance and theater works by Dean Moss, Fiona Templeton and Preeti Vasudevan; vocal directed for Daria Fain and Robert Kocik; and performed with Robert Ashley and Sekou Sundiata. Sinha teaches voice extensively, including at Centro Nacional de las Artes (Mexico City), the Rubin Museum of Art, Swarthmore College and Womankind (formerly New York Asian Women's Center).

Reflections and Repercussions: Aki Onda is co-commissioned by the Crow Museum of Asian Art and the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family SOLUNA International Music & Arts Festival.

Header Image: Aki Onda. Photo by Brian Whar.

Event photography by Turk Studio and Sylvia Elfazon, Courtesy of the Crow Museum of Asian Art.