Image courtesy of Joe Hanly
Correspondences | Xenia Pestova Bennett & Joe Hanly
Where? The Cooler @ The Complex, The Depot, 12 Mary's Abbey, Dublin 7, D07XR70
Date? 25 April
Time? 7.30 pm
Tickets? Here
Virtuoso pianist, composer and improviser Xenia Pestova Bennett joins forces with acclaimed visual artist Joe Hanly to present a striking interdisciplinary project. Correspondences combines pre-recorded digital audio with live performance featuring piano and toy piano alongside visual elements.
Hanly’s stunning video environments are projected on a series of interconnected monitors, arranged schematically and optionally mounted onto 3D physical objects and large canvas paintings. Pestova Bennett’s live improvisation and performance of pre-composed music interacts with the changing visual environment as she plays with footage of triggered, looped and projected clones of herself, interacting with independently evolving gestural complexity. The two artists combine seemingly disparate elements in novel ways to bring together music and visual art to create unexpected correspondences
First devised during a chance encounter between Xenia and Joe while on a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in 2022, this project is funded with support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
Xenia Pestova Bennett has earned an international reputation as a leading proponent of uncompromising music. Her work spans a wide range of sound worlds, styles and genres from classical and contemporary art music to free improvisation, experimental electronica, multimedia and avant-pop.
Xenia has been featured at major international festivals and prestigious concert halls around the world including at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, National Concert Hall in Dublin, The Glasshouse Gateshead, Glasgow Royal Concert Halls, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Festival Archipel (Geneva), Approximation (Dusseldorf), Ars Musica (Brussels), Christchurch Arts Festival (New Zealand), Lanaudière (Canada), London Contemporary Music Festival, Musica (Strasbourg), New Music Dublin, Royal Albert Hall (London), Sonorities (Belfast), Spark (USA), Rainy Days (Luxembourg) and Voix Nouvelles Royaumont (France). She has also performed in a tropical rainforest, on a river ferry, deep inside cave systems and underground fortresses and while partially submerged in a pond.
Xenia’s commitment to contemporary music inspired her to commission dozens of new works and collaborate closely with major innovators including Annea Lockwood, Karlheinz Essl and Gayle Young as well as champion numerous new voices. As a composer, Xenia is represented by the Contemporary Music Centre Ireland. Her ten studio albums to date include widely acclaimed recordings of core piano duo works by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen with Pascal Meyer for Naxos Records, collaborations with singer-songwriter Roxanne De Bastion and guitarist / producer Simon Tong (“The Piano Player of Budapest”), a collection of premiere recordings “Shadow Piano” for piano, toy piano and electronics (a “terrific album of dark, probing music”, Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader), complete piano works by Gayle Young hailed as "a triumph" (John Eyles, All About Jazz), and "Gold.Berg.Werk", a reimagining of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations by Karlheinz Essl described as "a sci-fi journey in the direction of 1741” (Luke Clancy, RTE Lyric FM).
Joe Hanly (b. 1952) is an acclaimed Irish visual artist, painter and printmaker who also incorporates video and 3D elements in installation form. His abstract paintings and video presentations comprise a diverse array of unrelated, self-contained components, often representational, drawn from the everyday paraphernalia of living, dreaming, memories and encouters. Joe has exhibited widely since the 1980s including major solo shows at such venues as The Limerick City Gallery, The RHA Gallery, Dublin, The Project Art Centre, The Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, The Model Gallery, Sligo and Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin.
Past work includes incorporating real-world objects into fantastical environments, such as hanging an upside-down tree on a rotating mechanism and the use of coinciding sound loops of varying lengths creating unsettling and hypnotic rhythms. His most recent exhibition TAP was staged in 2022 at the exciting new experimental Complex Gallery, Dublin. Watch it here.
Hanly's contribution draws from a wealth of experience in combining painting, print and sculpture with digital video elements and 3D environments to be experienced online. He lectured in Fine Art at the Dublin Institute of Technology (TUD) from 1984 until retirement in 2014 and at Dun Laoghaire School of Art and Design (AIDT) from 1982 until 1984. He co-founded No9 Screenprint Workshop in 1977 and was a founder member of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in 1983 where he set up The Print Studio at TBG+S. His work is included in many private and public collections.
Funded by the The Arts Council of Northern Ireland and The Arts Council of Ireland.
Special thanks to the Contemporary Music Centre of Ireland, Improvised Music Company, The Complex, Jaki Irvine, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, and Centre Culturel Irlandais.