Marina Rosenfeld’s new installation “The Agonists” populates the galleries of Museum Art.Plus with works in several media— pigment prints on silk, drawings and prints on paper, posters, and a fragmentary soundtrack — advancing the composer and artist’s longtime preoccupation with the social and spatial arrangements of sounds and their representations and distortions.

Rosenfeld’s works invite the viewer to engage across aural, optical and affective registers. Considerations of scale, of likeness, and of material difference and affiliation stand in, in their closeness or adjacency to music, for problems of instrumentation, the use and arrangement of bodies, histories of practice and even affiliation to various (historical) formal languages. New works take up their place alongside an aftereffect of an older one: a set of blank scores that are posters after the fact for the work Deathstar Orchestration, premiered at Donaueschinger Musiktage in 2017. 

The pun or double entendre, which has often circulated in Rosenfeld’s work in a subliminal or secondary register, occurs in The agonists at slightly higher volume: the exhibition could be described as both about reception, and as a kind of reception (the word function can also toggle between these conceptual poles), whereutterance, likeness and signal jostle for position or intelligibility, like distracted or argumentative guests caught in a grammatical or libidinal matrix. Rosenfeld writes: “The exhibition as situation or model— a space neither prosocial nor antisocial, but one promoting a kind of disorderly or agonistic sociality — is where I find another return to an idea of music’s possibility. What is a concert if not a deadpan assemblage of sexed bodies, recursive scripts, and empty (or pregnant) volumes, staves, airwaves and bandwidth?”

Marina Rosenfeld is an American composer and artist. Rosenfeld has created works for the Museum of Modern Art, the Park Avenue Armory, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Fondacion Serralves and the Guggenheim Museum among many others, and participated in surveys including the Whitney, Aurora, Montréal, PERFORMA and Liverpool biennials and the radio program of documenta14.