"Percy Grainger: Freedom As_____" part of Nite Art 2017

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Grainger Museum
Gate 13, Royal Parade
Parkville

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Grainger Museum

grainger@unimelb.edu.au

T: 0383445270

Free Event
Thursday 27 July 2017
6:00pm - 10:00pm 
Part of Nite Art 2017.

From Wentworth to know-your-worth: desires are indulged through our freedoms, but how enjoyable, or emancipated, is a freedom that is always already dictated?

Presented by Liquid Architecture, Grainger Museum and VCA/MCM as part of Nite Art 2017

A Liquid Architecture project curated by Mino Peric

Eric Demetriou & Herbert Jercher
Antonia Sellbach with Julia Burleigh & Alison Bolger
Is There A Hotline?
Anthony Lyons and Paul Fletcher

‘Freedom’ is to choose without the choice to not choose.

Fundamentally, freedom is the condition of being free. It may be seen as a duality between oppression and the oppressed. Here, freedom is observable as curtailment, limit, restriction; a matter of presence and absence.

Freedom may also be possessed through acts of self-agency. At times there are triumphant moments when it appears the oppressor has become the suppressed. Uncovered, the mouth speaks, revealing that it was there all along. Now, freedom begins to appear obtainable through assertion, interference, deviation.

Yet these variances of freedom become confused in the face of one’s own freedom. How do we separate an act of freedom from an act of self-interest? From Wentworth to know-your-worth: desires are indulged through our freedoms, but how enjoyable, or emancipated, is a freedom that is always already dictated?

Musically, freedom may be observed in multiple ways; through the relationship between conductor and performer, the act of free improvisation as self-expression, and the agency of performance transformed into musical forms of self-interest.

This program takes as its point of departure the music and ideas of autodidactic Australian composer and polymath Percy Grainger, specifically his sense of ‘freedom’ expressed in the works and experiments that he called free music. In a series of specially commissioned performances utilising Grainger’s recently rebuilt free music ‘machines’, a group of artists and musicians offer their own multifaceted readings of Grainger’s ‘freedom’, inviting the audience to consider what the term might signify today.

See the Facebook event for further information.