Adam Basanta
Resident Artist
17.5. – 17.6.
Adam Basanta (b. 1985) is a Montreal-based sound artist, composer, and performer of experimental music. His work traverses sound installations, experimental electronic and chamber music composition, site-specific interventions, and laptop performance. Across disciplines and media, he interrogates intersections between conceptual and sensorial dimensions of listening, the materiality of technological apparatus, and the instabilities of instrumentality. Adam Basanta’s work investigates perception – and listening in particular – as an active, participatory, multi-modal activity which is distributed throughout a variety of human and non-human agencies. By interrogating points of intersection between the conceptual and sensorial, the psychological and psychophysical, as well as conscious, bodily and mechanical dimensions of the listening experience, he aims to draw the viewer’s awareness towards undiscovered facets of their own listening. In his recent work, he exclusively uses objects from the world of commercial sound reproduction technologies. Disrupting their technical and economic functions, thus nullifying their potential as instruments of mass communication, these objects are transformed into sculptural sound- producing centerpieces. Through the use and subtle perversion of communication technologies, he aims to reveal their material agencies as prosthetic technologies-of-listening, while in turn allows reflection on the material agency of our own bodily "technologies" of listening. Arranging these objects into three-dimensional reconfigured listening situations, he creates spaces for aesthetic and conceptual contemplation of sound, listening, sonic technologies, and the manners in which these elements are at constant interplay.
Adam Basanta’s sound and audiovisual installations have been presented in North America and Europe in galleries and institutions including Carroll/Fletcher Gallery (London), Serralves Museum (POR), Edith-Russ-Haus fur Mediakunst (GER), Vitra Design Museum (GER), Laboral (ESP), Gallery B-312 (Montreal), Fonderie Darling (Montreal), Titanik Gallery (FIN), and The Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe (USA), and have been awarded in the Prix Ars Electronica 2013 and the 2014 Edith-Russ-Haus Awards for Emerging Media Artists. His experimental concert music has been presented worldwide, including appearances in the MATA Festival (NY), Gaudeamus Musicweek (NL), CTM Festival (GER), Akousma Festival (CAN), and Mutek Festival (CAN), and have been awarded multiple national and international prizes, including Metamorphoses 2010 (Belgium) and the Grand Prize in the SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers (Canada). Recently, his music has been released on Kohlenstoff Records (Montreal), Cassauna (USA), and Farmacia901 (Italy).
Adam holds a BFA in composition from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC) and an interdisciplinary MA in composition and sound art installation at Concordia University (Montreal, QC).
Residency is realized in cooperation with the Agosto Foundation.
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