For Mondays #3, Adrian Williams: One Word

Upon invitation of the Kunsthalle Münster, the US artist Adrian Williams together with six musicians staged their performance titled The Curve in the football stadium of the club SC Preußen Münster in 2019. For the short duration of the sunset, the stadium became the setting for an acoustic intervention in which light and sound joined in an interplay. The Curve revolved around the sunset: that transitory phase between day and night that structures our days into a before and an after. In 2021 the artist’s book of the same title was published—containing three reflections on the daily recurring moment when the sun.

For this podcast, Adrian Williams reads her text One Word, thus creating a separate audio work. In the text, she explores the meaning of the German word “Himmel”, meaning: sky/heaven. While collaborating on the book The Curve, based on her performance in Münster, the back-and-forth between English and German, German and English had revealed the inability of the German language to express the difference between “heaven” and "sky" in words. The impossibility of translating the semantic dimensions became apparent. It is precisely this moment of blurriness that served as the starting point of her text One Word. In a poetic approach, she traces the different meanings that seem lost as soon as one leaves one of the languages.

Adrian Williams (born in 1979 in Portland, Oregon) who, as a storyteller, combines texts with photographs and, in her performances, films and installations, examines the nuances between image, sound and text capable of stimulating the viewer’s imagination to create their own reality. Bringing together music, text and sound objects in her performances, she explores the phenomenon that even a sound can evoke a physical reality. After studying at the Cooper Union for Science and Art in New York and the Städelschule Frankfurt, she participated in exhibitions at the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (2007), the Athens Biennale (2009), Portikus (2011), GAM – Galleria civica d’arte moderna e contemporanea, Turin (2014), MMK Frankfurt (2014) and Hamburger Kunsthalle (2014), among others. In 2013, Williams won the prestigious ars viva prize, and in the same year her performance Watering Hole was shown in the garden of the Städel Museum Frankfurt. Recently, Williams’ works were on view in group exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig (2018), Kölnischer Kunstverein (2018) and Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (2021).

For Mondays is a production by Kunsthalle Münster. Concept: Merle Radtke. Editing and coordination: Artefakt Kulturkonzepte, Jana Bernhardt and Merle Radtke. Production: Bela Brandes. Introduction: Arne Lenk. Graphic design: JMMP – Julian Mader and Max Prediger.

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