Leah Singer and Lee Ranaldo present Contre Jour at MUDAS

Lee Ranaldo, co-founder of Sonic Youth, presents Contre Jour with visual artist Leah Singer, an audiovisual performance that brings together music, image, light, and shadow. The performance will take place on 31 October at 9:00 pm at the MUDAS.Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Madeira, and takes on a particularly significant dimension in the Madeiran context through Ranaldo and Singer’s connection with the work of Lourdes de Castro, one of the Portuguese artists whose work is a key reference for the conceptual universe of this creation.

​

Lee Ranaldo’s and Leah Singer's relationship with Lourdes de Castro dates back to 2011, when they visited the artist’s studio in Madeira, driven by a deep admiration for her work. That encounter gave rise to ideas for a possible collaboration between the two, but Lourdes de Castro’s death in 2022 made this possibility impossible. Her work nevertheless remains an important reference for the visual thinking behind Contre Jour, particularly in relation to notions of shadow, presence, and absence.

​

It is precisely the shadow that takes centre stage in the current version of Contre Jour. Ranaldo and his suspended electric guitar cast their own shadows onto the screen, establishing an ongoing dialogue with the images projected and manipulated live by Leah Singer. Recordings from previous performances are incorporated into the performance itself, creating a kind of mise en abyme, in which images from other moments become part of the present and the work continually transforms itself from within. The shadow thus ceases to be merely a visual effect and becomes material within the work itself.

​

The connection between music and image has been central to the work of Lee Ranaldo and Leah Singer since 1991, when they began their collaboration with DRIFT, a pioneering performance experiment combining live music with real-time manipulation of 16mm film projection. Over the following decades, the work evolved from film to digital video and to large-scale installations and performances, while consistently questioning the boundaries between concert, cinema, installation, and visual art.

​

In projects such as Sight Unseen, first presented in Toronto in 2010, the duo took this language to a monumental scale, occupying urban space with sound, light, and multiple projections. The presentation attracted approximately 15,000 people and marked a new stage in the relationship between the performer’s body, the instrument, the image, and space. Since then, Ranaldo and Singer have presented their work internationally in contexts as diverse as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlin Atonal, gnration in Braga, Dark Mofo in Tasmania, and the S8 International Film Festival in A Coruña, among others.

​

In Contre Jour, this long trajectory takes on a particularly distilled form. There is no linear narrative, nor a conventional separation between stage and audience. Ranaldo’s body, the suspended guitar, shadows, projections, and sound coexist within a space in constant transformation, inviting the audience into an experience that is simultaneously musical and performative.

 

One of the project’s defining characteristics is precisely its ability to question the conventional positions of performer and spectator. Rather than simply watching a performance, the audience is invited to remain within an environment in transformation, allowing the images and sound to surround and envelop them.

​

The presentation in Madeira adds a particularly meaningful dimension to this international trajectory. It is in Madeira, the place where Lourdes de Castro lived and worked, that Contre Jour finds a special resonance with the work of an artist who had a profound impact on Lee Ranaldo’s imagination. Without seeking to illustrate or reproduce Lourdes de Castro’s work, the performance approaches some of the questions that run through her practice: shadow as presence, the relationship between body and absence, and the transformation of space through light. This presentation therefore offers an opportunity for a long-standing artistic investigation into image, sound, and performance to coexist, in the same place, with the memory of an artist who was an important reference within Madeira’s cultural and artistic landscape. 

 

Contre Jour is constructed anew with each presentation through the encounter between what has been previously recorded and what unfolds, in that moment, before the audience. It is within this relationship between memory and the present, between image and sound, between body and shadow, that the performance finds its form.

​

Tickets are available exclusively through Eventbrite, priced at €15.

 

A production by APCA – Agency for the Promotion of Atlantic Culture, with the support of the Regional Secretariat for Tourism, Environment and Culture – Regional Directorate for Culture, through MUDAS.Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Madeira, and the Portuguese Republic – Culture, Youth and Sport / Directorate-General for the Arts.

​