Zimoun, 186 prepared dc-motors, cotton balls, cardboard boxes, 60 × 60 × 60 cm, (2013) motors, cotton, cardboard, power supply, 6.0 x 4.0 m, Courtesy of Studio Zimoun, photo: Elise Fournier
The NYUAD Art Gallery is pleased to present Zimoun’s first exhibition in the Gulf, as well as publish the first book-length monograph on the artist. ZIMOUN was curated by Maya Allison, Executive Director of the NYUAD Art Gallery and Chief Curator of NYU Abu Dhabi.
Zimoun’s art work consist of sculpture, music, composition, soundscape, and installation; it is minimalist, conceptual, expressive, technical, natural, open, rigid, and chaotic. It is not new media, not glitch, not interactive, not chance operations, and it is not even really kinetic art (he prefers the term “mechanized”), though in dialogue with all of these.
The audio produced by each work is the direct effect of each object’s action: what we see is what we hear. And yet, what we see looks like industry while what we hear may sound like the natural world-the opposite of technology, we might think. But nature is also systematic. As curator Guido Comis once described Zimoun’s work as revealing “what is otherwise invisible: the absolute precision of the mechanisms lying behind the unpredictability of all phenomena.” In fact, this dissonance is the norm, once we start listening closely to the threads of the soundscapes we inhabit every day.
The NYUAD Art Gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 12 – 8 pm. Guided exhibition tours are available upon request and can be booked here. The exhibition is open through June 1, 2019. The monograph, edited by Maya Allison, will be available in April 2019.
For more information, visit nyuad-artgallery.org/zimoun.
