Katinka Kleijn + Lia Kohl
Katinka Kleijn and Lia Kohl’s shared practice explores vulnerability and resilience through the cello as an object, a body, and a sound-making tool. Both cellists, composers, and sound artists, they have amassed a collection of broken cellos in order to explore unusual, counterintuitive, and even iconoclastic ways of working with them. As artists who are not only technicians of the cello but its companions and collaborators, their exploration is deeply personal, where the body of the cello is a corollary to their own. As such a site of empathy, the cello allows for unique experimentation with the limits of both tenderness and violence.
Augmented Geology (2022)
Augmented Geology is a body of work created while in residence in Joshua Tree, California. Drawing inspiration from the harsh and beautiful landscape, the duo experimented with rock, rain, sand, fire, and wide open space, testing and capturing their effects on the fragile cellos. Made in a landscape uniquely formed by time, erosion, and cataclysmic changes, the work is rooted in both patience and play.
Some explorations focus on sound – a group of cellos in a desert rainstorm renders a strangely joyful chorus of droplets on wood. Others, more visual and tactile– a cello filled with concrete, burned by the sun, or balanced on rock formations. Beyond being odd and arresting juxtapositions, these small performances accumulate into larger questions about time and ephemerality, material and transformation. The work is divided between video work and a series of sculptures/performance ephemera, and could be additionally activated in performance by the artists.
Water on the Bridge (2019)
