Susan Philipsz: Seven Tears

10 July - 25 September 2011
Ludwig Forum Aachen
Jülicher Straße 97-109
52070 Aachen
Germany
See ludwigforum.de for opening times etc

From 10 July 2011, a new exhibition by Susan Philipsz can be experienced at the Ludwig Forum. Seven Tears was created especially for the town of Aachen in North Rhine-Westphalia and is also closely related to Surround Me, her Artangel-commissioned song cycle in the City of London.

Philipsz has created a seventh piece and interwoven it with the six works that comprised Surround Me - and while the original installation took place in the public realm and in the open air, now it is  brought into the context of a controlled, closed building. The core of the exhibition is the central hall, once the production area of the former Emil Brauer umbrella factory, built in the 1920s.

Said Susan Philipsz: “I wanted to present the work in one location, so you can hear the work as a whole. And for me Aachen was the perfect place. Acoustically [the Ludwig Forum] is perfect.”

Over the course of her research she discovered parallels between the work of the major Renaissance composer, Thomas Ravenscroft, and the music of his contemporaries. Water, the current, the cycle, is a recurring theme. The court musician John Dowland, for instance, investigated the form of tear drops in seven instrumental variations (Lachrimae or Seven Tears). And tears that become the spring tide are the theme of John Bennet’s madrigal, Weep, O Mine Eyes.

In Aachen Susan Philipsz combines the six London works with a seventh, new piece To the Greenwood. The seven songs fill the 3,000-square-meter space of the ground floor of the Ludwig Forum as a complete work. Philipsz has arranged the pieces over 23 loudspeakers, creating a multilayered, sculptural quality. The visitor hears the songs alternately on different channels, individually and layered on top of one another, forming an acoustic picture with elements produced by the architecture of the hall itself.

In taking water as her theme, Philipsz was inspired by the historical importance of the thermal waters for bathing and drinking cures, but also the present-day interaction with the hot springs, or to be more precise, their invisibility in daily life. “[The hot springs] were such an important part of the city, and now they are almost forgotten—I think that’s a real shame. It’s so present but invisible.” And so a supporting program that accompanies “Seven Tears” will include tours of the most important springs in Aachen and Burtscheid.