François Le Roux, Le Bal masqué and L’Histoire du Soldat, Bourgie Hall, 18 April 2024
The Reuters News Agency photographer Mohammed Salem this week won the World Press Photo award for his snapshot of a Palestinian woman, Inas Abu Maamar, cradling the lifeless corpse of her 5-year-old niece, Saly, who reportedly was killed in an Israeli airstrike at Nasser hospital in Southern Gaza last October.
On the surface, it’s an aesthetically appealing image.
The cold and rigid textures of white marble and yellow sandstone behind the pair of women contrast their bodily figures, draped in blue, brown, and white textiles.
And yet another feature strikes the viewer on a more subliminal level: there is very little humanity to this photographic record of apparently human suffering.
The only hint we get of the subjects’ earthy identity is a snatch of Maamar’s hand emerging from her sleeve, gently caressing Saly’s enshrouded head. Otherwise, there is nearly no humanness evident in any recognizable corporeal features — an inverse, say, of the iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning image that The Associated Press photographer Nick Ut captured of Phan Thi Kim Phúc running naked and screaming down Route 1 near Trang Bang immediately following an American napalm attack on South Vietnam in 1972.
In Ut’s historic image, the horrors of war were laid bare in black and white, visceral, and unmistakable. With Salem’s more current photo, everything that’s terrible about genocide is concealed, abstracted, wrapped up literally as if mummified. It’s an image sanitized of pain that invites viewers at once to look and to not really see.
During the Vietnam War, it was customary in the U.S. not to show dead soldiers’ bodies in the media. Visible suffering was a duty for the other side to bear.
But through the proliferation of shocking media images amidst wars in Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Syria, the west no doubt fell victim to what the cultural theorist Susan Sontag in her book Regarding the Pain of Others defined “desensitizing horror.”
We’re frankly exhausted with looking at destruction and death. When there’s nothing else to look at, an image as enigmatic as Maamar’s requires an act of interpretation, forcing viewers to participate in discerning its true meaning.
Ensemble Urbain, Créations, Collectif MTL, 14 April 2024
How we signify internal pain entails a more symbolic vocabulary of representation. At a recent post-classical recital hosted by Ensemble Urbain, the composer and doctoral candidate Anita Pari chose to translate her own lived experience with mental health through music.
In a piece called “Escape for Cello and Piano,” Pari and accompanist Joshua Morris communicated sonically the experience of “persistent intrusive thoughts” — a phenomenon that everybody can experience, regardless of medical diagnosis or clinical disorder.
Ordering sound is one way to restructure any situation in which we find ourselves out of control. That’s why music — and art, more broadly — is such a successful therapeutic form, which we should consider before reaching for pharmaceuticals or other easy fixes.
Pari’s composition didn’t come off too conceptual, either; it wasn’t, so to speak, just a “one-note” performance. I found myself both aesthetically pleased as a listener, and emotionally moved as a person empathetic to those who find this life a struggle. What a wonderful place to put disordered energy.
Anybody who attempts to bring order into this world is going to scrape up against chaos. Anyone who tries to shine a light through darkness will inevitably cast a shadow.
Nary a Fang with Elizabeth Lima, No Hay Banda & Innovations en concert, La Sala Rossa, 15 April 2024
Not to disparage “one-note” performances, the experimental quartet Nary a Fang delivered a transcendent concert at La Sala Rossa last Monday, revolving around miniscule microtonal variations on a single frequency. Like listening to a piano being tuned, it becomes evident that an infinite number of notes exist between notes — that one is many, and many is one.
With this realization, it’s impossible not to be fulfilled by a drone that ostensibly never changes. When we find whatever it is we’re looking for — in sound as in life — there is no more “more” to find.
The Spanish kabbalist Shem Țob ibn Shem Țob wrote in his Sermon on Wa-Yeħi in the 1480s:
“Those who love money can never have enough of it. But the reward that comes to those who engage in Torah and commandments will fully satisfy them, for this goodness spreads like the water of a brook. Just as the sunlight can illuminate the entire world without diminishing, so the goodness of the world to come will not diminish, no matter how many share in it.”
The Philadelphia Orchestra, Maison Symphonique, 19 April 2024
A good conductor takes command of an orchestra, which is prerequisite. A great conductor can regulate the crowd with a wave of his hand.
While directing The Philadelphia Orchestra, his American charge, Yannick Nézet-Séguin after the first movement of Florence Price’s 4th Symphony on Friday night at Maison Symphonique gently and successfully instructed the sold-out audience to kindly hold their applause until the end of the piece.
It was a simple gesture, a subtle manual motion made without even turning around. But subtlety is most effective in a righteous demand for respect.
Is it possible that force isn’t the best way to overcome an army?
Wanda Koop, Who Owns the Moon, Musée des beaux-arts, until 4 August 2024
In preparation for painting, Wanda Koop lies on her back with eyes closed, often for hours, envisioning what each new piece should look like. Before a brush touches canvas, she has already formed a clear mental image of what the work will be.
“I love feeling that I’m always seeing everything in technicolour,” Koop told me at the press conference for her Musée des beaux-arts exhibition.
“It’s one of those shows where you should come by yourself and be quiet — like looking at the moon,” Koop suggests. “The eclipse is something that I speak to in my work. It’s something bigger than us.”◼︎
Cover image: Wanda Koop, Ukrainian Quartet — Power Plant, 2023, Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. ©️ Wanda Koop. Photographed for NicheMTL.
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