Touki Delphine: SUPERDRUM
Pricing: Free with museum admission
SUPERDRUM consists of more than one hundred second-hand drums, donated by the public or sourced through online marketplaces, thrift stores, and attics. No two drums are the same; each carries its own history in its shape, dents, discoloration, and old band logos.
With SUPERDRUM, Touki Delphine taps into a primal force and has composed new music, specially written for the possibilities and limitations of this machine. Their work blends groundbreaking techniques from the modern avant-garde with world music, playing with sound masses: layers of sound that form a dense, living texture. It sounds like Steve Reich interrupted by a swarm of bees, Caroline Shaw writing for A Roomful of Drums, or Edgard Varèse interpreted by a hundred woodpeckers.
During this artist-in-residence viewing, visitors are welcome to walk through the Hunter Center during museum hours to experience SUPERDRUM up close.
Performance activations will be announced in December.
About the Artist
Amsterdam-based Touki Delphine is a boundary-pushing collective of musicians, performers, and visual artists. They are making waves both nationally and internationally with monumental light and sound installations built from recycled materials: taillights in FIREBIRD, turn signal relays in RELAY, wiring in TRANSMISSION, and windshield washer fluid reservoirs and their pump motors in DRIFTING. Their latest work, SUPERDRUM, is constructed from second-hand drums, wooden branches, and car door lock mechanisms.
SUPERDRUM NL is created in collaboration with Veenfabriek, with funding from Performing Arts Fund NL.
SUPERDRUM USA is co-commissioned by PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA)