Hamburger Kunsthalle: Saâdane Afif / Augustin Maurs

One of the most captivating accompanying texts for artworks in museums can be found in Saâdane Afif's exhibitions. The French conceptual and installation artist invites acquaintances to enrich his often everyday-inspired artworks with poetic "lyrics." Some of these texts are then set to music by Afif's collaborators and performed live. This is the case with two compositions by the French musician Augustin Maurs, which are now being performed as part of the group exhibition "BUT I | THE WORLD | I SEE | YOU" (featuring works by Saâdane Afif) at the Kunsthalle. The world premiere of "King Coal Laments" is a musical adaptation of texts related to an Afif exhibition featuring 70 sculptures by Polish coal miners. These works depict scenes from everyday life and portraits of the mining community. Afif's presentation of these "readymades" poetically explores the ambivalent history of coal as a resource. The second musical piece „Musiques pour Tuyauterie“ references the most famous readymade in art history: Duchamp's scandalous 1917 urinal, which also serves as the basis for a current exhibition by Saâdane Afif at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Ten pieces for flute and voice have been composed here – played on instruments made from bird bones, modeled after the 35,000-year-old flutes from the Hohle Fels Cave, the oldest known musical instruments in the world. A temporal tunnel where prehistory meets avant-garde.