EMPAC Premieres Two Commissions Fall 2024

Troy, NY—EMPAC–the Curtis R. Priem Center for Experimental Media and Performing Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and its curatorial program celebrate the premiere of two commissions during the 16th fall season at the Center:

October 25, 2024: Filmmaker Bassem Saad and writer Sanja Grozdanić open up a complex grammar of mourning with the American premiere of their jointly authored performance for stage Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans & the American Century).

With a script that plays off official political stances as much as public affects and dissident impulses, Permanent Trespass contends with temporal, political, and intellectual fallout of “post-conflict” societies beset by imperialist violence in the 20th century. Its plot centers on two traveling eulogists who encounter one another in a declining architectural estate. They must contend with the sense of an ending—of an epoch, of a revolution, of a regime.

Saad and Grozdanić approach this expanded version of the work—which integrates a new sound score, film material, and experimental projection—as a cinepoem. They build on avant-garde techniques for merging the sensibility of poetic writing with the possibilities of cinema. After performing the new iteration of the stage work, the artists remain in residence at the Center to edit the film version of the project, which debuts at NW Aalst as part of Saad’s exhibition Century Bingo.

November 8, 2024: In a new performance and video installation, Marina Rosenfeld makes the American premiere of her commissioned work μ (mu), following its first presentation in the 15th Gwangju Biennale, which co-commissioned the project.

Titled after the mathematical term for friction or touch, and inspired by the artist’s longstanding interest in turntablism, the work takes place along the surface of a dubplate at the moment of inscription. Rosenfeld explores surface phenomena on these hand-cut records, captured at an incredibly small scale, as the work traces the path of a sculptural stylus.

μ (mu) engages both the material conditions of sound and its social aspects. At EMPAC, the installation imagines the artist’s acetate dubplates as a counterpart to traditional film, proposing the project as a point where the materiality of image-making, sound, and touch collide.

This presentation of μ (mu) includes a piano performance with a Yamaha transacoustic piano, expanding the work’s exploration of entanglements of acoustic resonance with digital sound. Rosenfeld’s composed score for the project integrates recordings that play with noise, analog synth, and forms of abrasion.

Premiere presentations of μ (mu) by Marina Rosenfeld and Permanent Trespass by Bassem Saad & Sanja Grozdanić are part of the fall 2024 season at the Center, continuing EMPAC’s commitment to artists as they make challenging new work, and to audiences who thrill in the experience.

Curators

Katherine C.M. Adams, Associate Curator, Time-Based Visual Art
Amadeus Julian Regucera, Curator, Music
Tara Aisha Willis, Curator-in-Residence, Theater & Dance

Special thanks

Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans & the American Century) by Bassem Saad & Sanja Grozdanić is commissioned by EMPAC and NW, Open House for Contemporary Art and Film in Aalst. µ (mu) by Marina Rosenfeld is commissioned by EMPAC and Gwangju Biennale. EMPAC’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. EMPAC is made possible by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

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