Max Eastley Exhibition @Katara Art Center

Events Details

What: Max Eastley Exhibition
Date: 15 December 2013 - 25 January 2014
Location: Katara Art Centre, Doha

As part of Qatar UK 2013, renowned British sound and installation artist Max Eastley will present an exhibition and performance of new work at Katara Art Center.

The artist's poetic and dreamlike installations, often based on the tension between instability and equilibrium in nature, will be constructed of materials and objects found in Doha and others brought in from the UK. The exhibition and performance will be accompanied by a workshop, presenting a rare opportunity for Doha-based artists to interact and engage with an artist with over forty years of critical acclaim.


About Max Eastley
Max Eastley's work combines kinetic sound sculptures and music into a unique artform. His work has been exhibited across the world, including Hayward Gallery's Sonic Boom show, the Natural History Museum in London, and the 2002 Festival De Arte Sonoro in Mexico City. He has performed in world famous venues including the Tate Britain and the Barbican Centre, and has run workshops about music and sound for all ages across the UK. He has collaborated with David Toop, Victor Gama, Graham Coxon and Spaceheads, amongst many others, and written music for Siobhan Davies' Dance Company. He is deeply involved in the Cape Farewell climate change project, and travelled on two expeditions to the Arctic circle. He plays an electro-acoustic monochord called The Arc, an instrument he invented and made himself. It is made of wood and wire and is scraped, bent and flexed into an orbit of amplified effects. He is currently an Arts and Humanities Research Council Senior Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, carrying out research into Aeolian phenomena.

"I began as a visual artist, in 1972, started using sound by applying movement and the materials of sculpture to the basic principles of musical instruments: Wind, Strings and Percussion. I investigated musical phenomena, such as Aeolian Harps, which never play the same sequence twice, and created Aeolian installations that produced chance events. I then recorded these and listed to the results.
At the same time, I was producing interior installations, trying to make them as unpredictable as the exterior works. Using motors, which are normally used to create predictable, stable systems, instability was introduced by creating structures that produced the complex mixture of chaos and pattern found in nature.
I chose not to use any system of tuning: the metals for example, were chosen visually and I put random pitches of Aeolian Flutes together, but I tuned strings to specific tone rows. Sometimes amplification and filtering was used, treating the installation as an installation." - Max Eastley

Photo by Max Eastley Facebook