Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, known professionally as Allora & Calzadilla, explore music’s capacity to evoke an ancestral time and to interrogate what makes us human. Through live performances, films, sound, and sculpture, the artists take on various notions of the interval—the time between events, the measure between two points in space, or the range between musical notes— to discover possible ways to reconsider the distance between our present and our past.
Each Allora & Calzadilla work on view in Allora & Calzadilla: Intervals stems from a cultural artifact or a vibrant remainder from various moments in history—whether the remains of nineteenth-century elephants, the fragmented bones of dinosaurs, a prehistoric figurine, or the oldest musical instrument ever discovered. Choral and orchestral performances reimagine concerts from another century, and an intimate vocal score produces new friction between human presence and the prehistoric past. As archaeological exercises that unsettle linear time, the works in this exhibition wrestle with the abyss that lies between the human experience and our evolving place within the larger universe.
