Scoli Acosta — Music of Morocco — Laurent Godin Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 4 → May 11, 2013

Galerie Laurent Godin is proud to announce Scoli Acosta’s (1973 — Los Angeles) second solo exhibition, Music of Morocco. It exclusively presents a new body of works and will be accompanied by a listening evening with Andreas Oskar Hirsch.

In 1959, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Library of Congress, the American composer and writer Paul Bowles set out to record the Music of Morocco in a Volkswagen Bug, with two companions and a reel to reel tape recorder.

In June 2012 during a four-month stay at the Dar Al-Ma’mûn residency in Morocco, Scoli Acosta decided with artist Andreas Oskar Hirsch to trace the same route and make recordings in the same locations. In a month’s time, using a copy of a map Bowles drew, they were able to retrace the entire southern portion of the country.

The radio-play produced from these recordings by the two artists is presented during the listening evening.

Scoli Acosta shows at Galerie Laurent Godin a series of paintings and totem-like sculptures produced using circular bendir (a traditional moroccan tambourine) frames and materials supplied by a local craftsman. Taken together, the totems and monochromes distill the constitutive elements of painting — canvas, stretcher, paint — even as they insist on their relationship to the everyday, on their grounding in the world.

“Moving beyond the specific object — to use Donald Judd’s term — of the 1960s, which were neither paintings nor sculptures, but something in between, Acosta’s tambourines are at once paintings and functional objects, diverting the legacy of modernist painting to the realm of the everyday, the hand-held, and the percussive”.

Jill Dawsey, curator at the MCASD