Vivian Caccuri and Miles Greenberg at New Museum

Artists: Vivian Caccuri and Miles Greenberg

Exhibition title: The Shadow of Spring

Curated by: Bernardo Mosqueira

Venue: New Museum, New York, US

Date: November 10, 2022 – February 5, 2023

Photography: All images copyright and courtesy of the artists, New Museum, New York and their respective copyright owners

Artists Vivian Caccuri and Miles Greenberg, based respectively in Rio de Janeiro and New York, will collaborate for the first time on an exhibition designed for the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery. “The Shadow of Spring” investigates the phenomenon of vibration and its ability to trigger collective transformative experiences. Featuring newly commissioned sculptures, installations, embroidery pieces, and sound works developed separately and in collaboration, this exhibition will form an encompassing environment created to provoke alternative ways to experience the sonic dimension.

Greenberg, known for his emotive durational performances, will present two newly commissioned sculptures. Each piece was developed from 3D scans of his own body taken during Fountain I, a seven hour-long performance from 2022. The abstracted three-dimensional sculptures generated by this process function as fountains pouring water from multiple points, adding to the soundscape of the space. The three sculptures are staggered across the gallery, seemingly floating on the surface of mysterious pools of unknown depth, bordered by volcanic stones.

Installed on opposite sides of the space, Caccuri’s large-scale installations combine sound system and embroidery works, continuing the artist’s investigations of sound and sensory perception through objects, installations, and performances. Her two embroidered works echo the shapes of Greenberg’s sculptures, depicting abstracted scenes in which groups of dancers challenge the conventional limits between individual bodies. The carefully hand-made embroidery works adorn plastic fabric typically used as mosquito netting and stretched within a frame of hi-fi speakers, expanding a body of research previously presented at the Venice Biennial in 2019.

The two sets of thematically related works are further connected by a new sound piece jointly created by Caccuri and Greenberg, enveloping the audience and the entire installation in an experience of spatial reorientation. Inspired by how different rhythms and frequencies can affect group dynamics (as in temples, dance floors, and urban spaces), through “The Shadow of Spring” Caccuri and Greenberg together investigate the multifaceted relationships between bodies and sound waves.

Vivian Caccuri (b. 1986 in São Paulo, Brazil; lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) uses sound as the vehicle to experiment in sensory perception with issues related to history and social conditioning. Through objects, installations, and performances, her work creates situations that disorient everyday experience and, by extension, disrupt meanings and narratives seemingly as ingrained as the cognitive structure itself. Caccuri has developed projects in many cities in Brazil and abroad, including Accra, Detroit, Helsinki, Vienna, Venice, Kiev, Valparaíso, New Mexico, and South India, among others. Throughout her career she has collaborated with musicians, such as Arto Lindsay (USA/BR), Gilberto Gil (BR), Fausto Fawcett (BR), and Wanlov (Ghana), and recently released her first musical project (Homa). Her sound works and compositions have been broadcast on radio stations such as Resonance FM (London), Kunstradio (Vienna), and Rádio Mirabilis (Rio de Janeiro). At Princeton University, she wrote her first book, “Music is What I Make” (2012), published in Brazil and awarded the Funarte Prize of Critical Production in Music in 2013.

Miles Greenberg (b. 1997 in Montreal, Canada; lives and works in New York, NY, and Reykjavík, Iceland) is a performance artist and sculptor. His work consists of large-scale, sensorially immersive, and often site-specific environments revolving around the physical body in space. These installations are activated with often extreme durational performances that invoke the body as sculptural material. These performances are then captured in real time before the audience to generate later video works and sculptures. Rigorous and ritualistic in its methodology, Greenberg’s universe relies on slowness and the decay of form to heighten the audience’s sensitivities. The work follows self-contained, non-linear systems of logic that are best understood in relation to one another. At age seventeen, Greenberg left formal education, launching himself into four years of independent research on movement and architecture, which spanned a number of residencies in Paris, northern Italy, Beijing, and New York. He has worked under the mentorship of Édouard Lock, Robert Wilson, and Marina Abramović, and has since exhibited extensively internationally.

“Vivian Caccuri and Miles Greenberg: The Shadow of Spring,” 2022. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum