Anthea Hamilton

As part of “Pourquoi Paris ?” project, the British artist Anthea Hamilton, known for her installations, sculptures and performances, presents a premiere of Decade of Emotion a staging of a fictional music group, inspired by 1960s and 1970s prog rock. Inspired by a musical genre as rebattu as modern, these fanciful musicians oscillate between formalism and eclecticism, poetry and technicality. 

Decade of Emotion came to Anthea Hamilton in a vision of the open-air inner courtyard at the National Museum of Ethnology in Ôsaka, designed in 1974 by Japanese architect Kishō Kurokawa (1934-2007), in which reproductions of works of past civilizations are exhibited on a large plinth of ink-colored stone. In this space, the heaviness of the stone figures evokes minimalist art and ambiguity, gravity and ornamentation, and a constant dialogue of materials and forms. Anthea Hamilton explains: “I wanted to use this image as a model for a progressive rock group, as a sonic and visual exploration, and above all, it allowed me to work for the first time with sound at a large scale.”  

Decade of Emotion resembles the formation of an ephemeral music group, a trajectory of celestial bodies confined to one day, one concert, one album, and just one song. The music, scenography and costume follow in the form of the genre, offering a narrative domain for personal histories, fantasies and confessions applied with manifold influences and heavy detail throughout. The work questions at every moment the limits between inter-generational reality and formations of taste. 

The performance continues at the Auditorium of the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, at 8 pm and at the Paris’s club Tango.