Anri Sala, Was it Mi, 2013. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.
I Wish This Was A Song
Curated by Tlön Projects
Works by: Bani Abidi, Tim Ayres, Pavel Büchler, Becket MWN, Laurent Fiévet, Natalia Papaeva, Susan Phillipsz, Anri Sala, Tris Vonna-Michell
Luther Museum
Nieuwe Keizersgracht 570
1018 VG Amsterdam
28 March – 15 June 2025
Review by Àngels Miralda
Anri Sala, Was it Mi, 2013. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.
I Wish This Was a Song (28 March-15 June) is an exhibition curated by Tlön Projects for the Luther Museum in Amsterdam. It includes a selection of artworks that each approach the power and uses of song in the formation of identity, community, place, politics and culture. Each artwork is a self-contained object that integrates into the 18th century canal-side diaconate house and the permanent collection of historical artefacts related to Amsterdam’s Lutheran community. The exhibition runs parallel to Zing!, an exhibition on the musical compositions of Luther himself, whose hymns served as protest songs that ended up defining the Lutheran community and even serving as a battle anthem in Germany.
Before entering the contemporary exhibition, the last case in Zing! displays a wooden lute that would have played the 16th century songs. Its wooden material produces imaginary metallic sound waves flowing into the next room, where the first work is a similarly wooden instrument – an impossible three-keyed piano accompanied by an altered score. Anri Sala’s Was it Mi (2013) questions the limitations of music, and establishes the possibilities of sound within the instruments of the time, with its own distinct nod to a recognizable Lynchian ballad from Twin Peaks. Although the piano suggests a soundscape, what can be heard emerges from a small sculpture across the room. Becket MWN’s Speeches from the Factory Floor is a sculptural sound piece that plays a compilation of clips from pop stars who used the stages of the MTV Music Video Awards ceremony to denounce political conditions. From Kurt Cobain to Kanye West, musicians take to the stage with words of political dissent.
Becket MWN, Speeches from the Factory Floor, 2020. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.
Becket MWN, Speeches from the Factory Floor, 2020. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.
Laurent Fiévet, Water Bucket, 2015. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.
Laurent Fiévet, Water Bucket, 2015. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.
Tris Vonna-Michell, Audio Poems: distracted listening, 2015. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.
Tris Vonna-Michell, Audio Poems: distracted listening, 2015. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.
Most works in this exhibition are small and self-contained, integrating seamlessly with the period décor. Sometimes they are hosted in obsolete recording technologies or old television screens adding a historical reference to our analog and digital experience with sound. A vintage television screen plays Laurent Fiévet’s Water Bucket (2015) where a re-edited Snow White sings in a Disney Classic. Pavel Büchler’s You Don’t Love Me (2007) is a kinetic and sonic sculpture whose short tape passes over a tipped-over whiskey bottle, slowly degrading with time. Tris Vonna-Michel’s Audio poems: distracted listening (2015) serves as a sonic souvenir from a trip to Japan that the artist made in 2008. It records sound through a tourist gaze, one that thoughtfully creates a listening scrapbook of travel impressions.
Natalia Papaeva, Yokhor, 2018. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.
Susan Phillipsz, The Dead (The Lass of Aughrim), 2000. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.
Susan Phillipsz, The Dead (The Lass of Aughrim), 2000. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.
On a flat screen in the third room, Natalia Papaeva’s Yokhor (2018) shows the artist singing two lines of a song from her homeland of Buryat in Eastern Siberia. Many communities of the region have been subject to colonial control and cultural erasure; the artist repeats the two lines like a mantra, holding on to this fragment of her cultural identity. The last room continues the theme of song and loss in Susan Phillipsz The Dead (The Lass of Aughrim) (2000) referencing a short story by James Joyce, Ireland’s most famous writer. In the opposite corner, a large box-like television screen shows Bani Abidi’s Anthems (2000). This work reverses the powerplay of sound, this time playing the national anthems of India and Pakistan in reference to the violence and trauma of colonial partition. Separated by a wall, two women dance to each national anthem, turning the volume up to drown out the other in a piquant 3-minute gestural video about song’s ability to divide.
Bani Abidi, Anthems, 2000. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.
At the exit of the exhibition two paintings by Tim Ayres I wish this was a song (2024) and A song a world to me (2023) hang on the final wall of the museum. The exhibition, titled after this work, is a wide historical and material analysis of music in society. The title, referencing Ayre’s painting, confronts the format of music and exhibition-making. This selection of works that spans the first 25 years of the 21st century is resolutely material and open-ended, it opens a discussion through choral dissonances that offer a variety of positions on the use of song as personal or pop, as power, as protest, as authority, and as counter-authority to the times we live. The exhibition acts as a compilation that does not narrate or constrain, but rather opens discussion onto the role that music plays in the construction of ourselves and the power structures that surround us.
Tim Ayres, I wish this was a song, 2024. Photography by Victor Wennekes, courtesy Luther Museum Amsterdam.