this week in lectures, signings, panel discussions, workshops, and Q&As

OM LAB: OFFER YOUR VOICE

Visitors can contribute to a collective OM at Rubin Museum

Visitors can contribute to a collective OM in Rubin Museum installation

Rubin Museum
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Wednesday – Monday through May 8, $10-$15 (free Fridays 6:00 – 10:00)
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

People have been chanting the sacred Sanskrit syllable “OM” for three centuries, believing it is “the sum total of everything.” Visitors are now offered the opportunity to become part of the largest collective OM in history in the participatory Rubin Museum exhibit “OM Lab.” Through May 8, everyone is invited to go to the sixth floor of the former Barney’s home and share their cosmic vibration in a sound booth. As you record your “OM,” your personal sound waves are projected on the wall behind the booth. As you wait in line, you can read banners that explore the derivation and utilization of the sound, including “The Supreme Mantra and Imperishable Truth,” “The Instrument of Transformation,” and “The Mantra of Many Faiths” (Hindu, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism). “OM connects you to history,” Rosanne Cash explains in her “Why I OM” video made for the Rubin. “We connect to those who have done it before us. . . . There’s something about it; it just feels so good in your head, and in your chest, and in your mouth. It’s familiar.” That connection will be felt when the Rubin turns all of the “OM Lab” recordings into a single, collective chant that will be on display beginning June 16 in “The World Is Sound” exhibit. “Sound has always been a primary aspect of spiritual inquiry,” yoga master Rodney Yee says in his “Why I OM” video. “There is an open sound, and then there is an ending, a closure. So, ‘Amen,’ ‘OM,’ I think they do something to the physiology of the human body. They create both a giving and a receiving. It ends up actually having an amazing unifying effect if people allow themselves to drop into it.” And you don’t have to be a practitioner to participate; going into that booth and letting your OM sing is a freeing, cathartic experience, even if you’ve never done it before. In conjunction with the exhibit, on April 22 ($25) calligrapher and artist Tashi Mannox will host “Sacred Syllables and Their Sounds,” followed by the launch of the second edition of his book Sacred Scripts: A Meditative Journey Through Tibetan Calligraphy, and on May 6 ($108), Satya Scainetti will lead the workshop “Mala for Mother’s Day,” in which participants can create a garland of prayer beads made from angelite, black onyx, carnelian, fancy jasper, green onyx, or rose quartz, each of which has different peaceful properties for the mind, body, and soul.

TALES OF OUR TIME

Tsang Kin-Wah, “No(thing/Fact) Outside,” vinyl, 2016 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Through March 10 (closed Thursday), $18 – $25 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

The Guggenheim’s “Tales of Our Time” exhibition, featuring half a dozen contemporary Chinese artists and collectives, comes to a close this week with several final events. On March 7 and 8 at 7:00 and 9:30, Raimundas Malašauskas and Marcos Lutyens’s hour-long, site-specific “Hypnotic Show” is a conceptual, imaginary experiment in cognitive narrative. On Wednesday afternoon, 1:30 to 5:45, Yangjiang Group’s “Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken” will be activated for the last time, a tea gathering in which visitors can sit down in a peaceful environment, sip tea, contemplate calligraphy, and measure their heart rate and blood pressure before and after the communal experience. The second exhibition of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative, “Tales of Our Time” consists of specially commissioned works commenting on place and history, inspired by the 1936 book Gushi xin bian (Old Tales Retold) by Lu Xun. In “Taxi,” Taipei artist Chia-En Jao films his political conversations with cabdrivers as he goes to historically significant locations; meanwhile, his unique coat-of-arms flag titled “Arms No. 31” reveals key moments in Taiwan’s history through detailed symbolism. Zhou Tao’s two-channel video “Land of the Throat” depicts current landscapes undergoing development, with some futuristic, otherworldly elements added. Kan Xuan’s “Kū Lüè Er,” which translates as “to circle a piece of land,” is a multichannel installation of stop-motion cell-phone pictures and sandstone sculptures of barbed wire exploring the evolution and erosion of cities and the relationship between nature and humanity.

In addition to the Wednesday tea gathering, Yangiang Group’s “Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken” boasts a balcony garden and a three-level green post of calligraphy that references a newspaper headline in which former vice president Joe Biden discussed healthy competition between China and the United States. Hong Kong artist Tsang Kin-Wah’s “In the End Is the Word” references the battle between China and Japan as ships fight it out on the ocean, concluding with a stream of phrases from such philosophers as Marx, Sartre, Derrida, and Nietzsche (“The end of its miserable life,” “Fill and refill all over again”) pouring off the screen, morphing into “No(thing/Fact) Outside,” the vinyl words spreading over nearby walls, a staircase, the floor, and even an elevator. Sun Xun’s “Mythological Time” revisits the coalmine of his hometown of Fuxin in a stop-motion charcoal animation and mural reminiscent of the work of William Kentridge. Finally, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s “Can’t Help Myself” is a giant industrial robot that performs balletic moves as it tries to keep viscous red liquid resembling blood into a confined area around it while the liquid inevitably oozes away and at times ends up splattered on the polycarbonate wall, referencing both automation and endless violence. Speaking of place and history, the Guggenheim is also celebrating its eightieth anniversary with the greatest-hits exhibition “Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim,” exploring the past, present, and future of the collection.

AGNÈS VARDA — LIFE AS ART: DAGUERRÉOTYPES

Agnès Varda will be at FIAF on March 7 to talk about her 1975 documentary, DAGUERRÉOTYPES

CinéSalon: DAGUERRÉOTYPES (Agnès Varda, 1975)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, March 7, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesday nights through March 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

On February 28, legendary auteur Agnès Varda was at FIAF for the special talk “Agnès Varda: Visual Artist.” The Belgium-born, France-based Varda, who is eighty-eight, will be back at FIAF on March 7 for the 7:30 screening of her 1975 documentary, Daguerréotypes, after which she will participate in a Q&A with former MoMA curator Laurence Kardish. (The film will also be shown at 4:00; both screenings will be followed by a wine and beer reception.) The eighty-minute work, which only received its official U.S. theatrical release in 2011 at the Maysles Cinema, is an absolutely charming look at Varda’s longtime Parisian community. In the film, Varda, who has made such New Wave classics as Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Bonheur as well as such seminal personal documentaries as The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès, turns her camera on the people she and husband Jacques Demy lived with along the Rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. Varda, who also narrates the film, primarily stands in the background while capturing local shopkeepers talking about their businesses and how they met their spouses as customers stop by, picking up bread, meat, perfume, and other items. Varda uses a goofy, low-rent magic show as a centerpiece, with many of the characters attending this major cultural event; the magician references the magic of both life and cinema itself, with Varda titling the film not only after the street where she lives but also directly evoking the revolutionary photographic process developed by Louis Daguerre in the 1820s and ’30s. Daguerréotypes has quite a different impact now than it did back in the mid-1970s, depicting a time that already felt like the past but now feels like a long-forgotten era, when neighbors knew one another and lived as a tight-knit community. The FIAF CinéSalon series “Agnès Varda: Life as Art” continues with Jacqot de Nantes on March 14 and Lola on March 21. Varda fans will also want to check our her gallery show at Blum & Poe, which runs through April 15.

TOUCHING INFINITY: A CONVERSATION WITH LEE UFAN

Lee Ufan will be at Asia Society on March 8 for an Asia Week conversation with curator Michelle Yun (photo courtesy Lee Ufan)

Who: Lee Ufan, Michelle Yun
What: Discussion between artist Lee Ufan and curator Michelle Yun
Where: Rose Conference Hall, Asia Society, 725 Park Ave. at 70th St., 212-288-6400
When: Wednesday, March 8, free with advance registration, 6:30
Why: In conjunction with Asia Week New York, Korean-born conceptual artist and philosopher Lee Ufan will sit down with Michelle Yun, Asia Society Museum senior curator of modern and contemporary art, for “Touching Infinity: A Conversation with Lee Ufan.” A painter, sculptor, and leader of the Mono-ha (“School of Things”) movement, Lee had a dazzling exhibition in 2011 at the Guggenheim, “Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity,” about which we wrote, “Lee emphasizes how experiencing his work is built on the concept of relationship, between humans and nature, the artist and the object, the viewer and the installation, different objects within a piece, and even the exhibition and the museum itself.” The talk will focus on the eighty-year-old Lee’s recent residency at famed porcelain company Manufacture de Sèvres and his work in clay.

THE SETTLERS

Settler recites Jewish prayer in compelling documentary about ongoing battle between Israelis and Palestinians over land ownership and governance

THE SETTLERS (Shimon Dotan, 2016)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, March 3
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.facebook.com

Shimon Dotan’s The Settlers opens with purposefully shaky, uneasy shots from a car speeding down a highway and through a tunnel, then cuts to a calm, peaceful view of a vast, beautiful landscape interrupted by a community of bland houses, creating just the right mood shifts for this compelling documentary, which traverses the history of the controversial Israeli settlements that have been a pivotal part of a possible peace treaty between Israelis and Palestinians. Dotan speaks with Rabbi Hanan Porat, the Israeli man considered to be one of the founders of the settlement movement; Palestinian human rights activist Raja Shehadeh, esq.; and a wide range of settlers who defend their right to live where they want to. Dotan also traces the political history of the region over the last century, examining several wars and how the map of the area has continued to change. The film opens March 3 at Film Forum, with writer-director Dotan, whose previous award-winning films include Hot House and The Smile of the Lamb, participating in Q&As following the 7:30 show Friday night, the 7:15 show on Saturday, and the 2:50 show on Sunday.

NIHON BUYO DANCE

Geimaruza will perform nihon buyo dance at Japan Society this weekend (photo courtesy of the artists)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
March 3-4, intro lecture & demonstration, $12 (free for same-night ticket holders), 6:30
March 3-4, performances, $55, 8:00
Saturday, March 4, workshop, $75, 2:00
Sunday, March 5, family program, $28, 4:00
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.geimaruza.com

Geimaruza, a Japanese troupe consisting of alumni from Tokyo University of the Arts, will be at Japan Society this weekend with “Nihon Buyo Dance,” offering a mélange of kabuki and folk-dance performances, workshops, and a family-friendly event, melding the contemporary with the traditional. On March 3 and 4 at 8:00, six dancers and eight musicians (playing shamisen, fue, taiko, otsuzumi, and kotsuzumi) will perform Ayatsuri Sanbaso (Puppet Sanbaso), Oshukubai (The Nightingale in the Plum Tree), Shunkashuto (Four Seasons), and the musical numbers “Nagare,” “Toki,” and “Shishi.” featuring three drummers and fue). Each show will be preceded at 6:30 ($12, free for ticket holders) by the lecture-demonstration “A Comprehensive Intro/Demo to Nihon Buyo with Geimaruza.” On Saturday at 2:00 ($75), the workshop “Nihon Buyo Dance & Music with Geimaruza” will teach participants various movements, set to live music. The weekend comes to a close on Sunday at 4:00 ($28) with “Nihon Buyo Dance for Kids & Families,” featuring an introduction to kabuki-based dance and performances of Ayatsuri Sanbaso (Puppet Sanbaso) and Oshukubai (The Nightingale in the Plum Tree).

CRITICAL JUNCTURES: GLENN LIGON

Glenn Ligon and Samora Pinderhughes will be in conversation at YoungArts event at NYLA

Glenn Ligon and Samora Pinderhughes will discuss pivotal moments at YoungArts event at New York Live Arts on March 5

Who: Glenn Ligon, Samora Pinderhughes
What: National YoungArts Foundation Salon Series
Where: New York Live Arts Theater, 219 West 19th St., 212-691-6500
When: Sunday, March 5, $10, 2:00
Why: In 2011, New York City–based visual artist Glenn Ligon had a major midcareer retrospective, “Glenn Ligon: America,” at the Whitney. In 2009, Berkeley high school pianist and composer Samora Pinderhughes was named a YoungArts Winner in Jazz Keyboard. On March 5 at 2:00 at New York Live Arts, the two will take part in the latest edition of the National YoungArts Foundation Salon Series, “Critical Junctures: Glenn Ligon,” as they look at pivotal moments in their creative process while placing it in sociohistorical context. The Salon Series, which “brings together creative alumni voices and offers audiences an opportunity to engage with internationally renowned and emerging artists,” will be back at New York Live Arts on May 14 with “Critical Junctures: Alexei Ratmansky,” in which the Russian-American choreographer will be in conversation with 2011 YoungArts Dance Winner and ABT soloist Cassandra Trenary.