Music Palace: making music visible

Once again, the Boghossian Foundation has put together a substantial exhibition at the Villa Empain that combines contemporary Western and Eastern artists in a stimulating dialogue on an accessible theme that – although apparently not weighty – offers plenty of food for thought. This time, the theme is music and, in particular, as the curator Diana Wiegersma points out, its power: music as a vector of faith and transcendence, as a factor in identity and as something that brings people together, as a tool of dissent and provocation, as an outlet... One outstanding example of this complex intermingling, amid the dozens and dozens of works on show, is a video installation by Adel Abidin, an Iraqi based in Finland, who has represented both countries at the Venice Biennale, Iraq in 2011 and Finland in 2007. In his Three Love Songs, we see and hear three female singers with Scandinavian looks, who each in turn and each on a different screen sing a love song in different styles: pop, jazz, and lounge. They learned the lyrics, which are in an Iraqi dialect and are shown in Arabic and English subtitles, phonetically, without knowing that the song was actually a rather bellicose hymn to the glory of Saddam Hussein (“For your eyes, many necks can be sacrificed”).

(© Adel Abidin)

The discrepancy points up the way in which political power can use music for its own ends. Other works draw attention to the role of jazz in African-American liberation (Allen Ruppersberg, who exhibited at Wiels over the summer), the proscriptions relating to music in Iran (Anahita Razmi’s video Domino Dancing and Newsha Tavakolian’s photographs), and the almost despairing idleness of unemployed Armenian immigrants (Melik Ohanian’s video installation). On a lighter note, music is also evoked in terms of its stars, who may symbolise a sense of national pride, as illustrated by the room devoted entirely to the legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum, and in the French artist Arnaud Maguet’s playful tributes to the Beatles and Elvis, which involve wigs, a 1960s ventilator, and Ferrero Rocher wrappers.

MUSIC PALACE, THE POWER OF MUSIC SEEN BY VISUAL ARTISTS > 8/2, di/ma/Tu > zo/di/Su 10 > 18.30, €4/8/10, Villa Empain, avenue Franklin Rooseveltlaan 67, Elsene/Ixelles, 02-627.52.30, www.fondationboghossian.com