The Nasher Sculpture Center is now announcing the fifth of its ten plans for the Nasher XChange citywide sculptures commissioned for its tenth anniversary. The first of the announced projects to be installed in the Nasher garden itself, it will be a pavilion created by Alfredo Jaar and have a sound component involving a symphony of crying babies.
Chilean-born, New York-based artist/architect/filmmaker Jaar is probably best known for his socio-political installations. His six-year long work about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, The Rwanda Project, received much acclaim and included a piece called The Silence of Nduwayezu, which was inspired by Jaar’s meeting of a young refugee who responded to witnessing his own parents’ deaths-by-machete with a month-long muteness.
In this project, entitled Music (Everything I know I learned the day my son was born), Jaar will celebrate life and the result will be far from mute. In collaboration with Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas, Methodist Dallas Medical Center and Parkland Health & Hospital System, the sounds of the first few seconds of life of babies born in Dallas between October 1 and February 1 will be recorded and uploaded in the pavilion. Throughout the duration of the exhibition (October 19-February 16), the time-stamped recordings will repeat and new recordings will be added.
“These babies will enter the museum at the earliest age possible, almost immediately out of their mothers’ womb. They will come not as visitors, but as active participants—as artists and performers themselves,” says Jaar.
