United Arab Emirates | November 2, 2021:   The new edition of Artist’s Rooms has launched at Jameel Arts Centre, featuring a site-specific installation by Samson Young. Reasonable Music is an interactive environment consisting of (text as) sound and (text as) image. 

Drawn largely from the Art Jameel Collection, Artist’s Rooms is a series of solo exhibitions by influential, innovative artists, with a particular focus on practitioners from the Middle East, Asia and Africa. These capsule shows are collaborative and curated in dialogue with the artist. 

The components within Reasonable Music are derived from the processing of translating the Daoist text Daodejing. Insights from computational analysis on the text’s formal features are filtered through human intuition to generate a network of sonic and visual objects. As formal features progress along a chain of events, they are transformed, distorted, and take on new features.

Artist’s Rooms: Samson Young is accompanied by a monograph with an essay by Orianna Cacchione, Curator of Global Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art, at the University of Chicago. The monograph is published by Art Jameel and is available from the Art Jameel Shop. 

Reasonable Music is commissioned by Art Jameel in collaboration with the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and Burger Collection. Each venue will show an iteration of the work, one on display at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the other on display at Jameel Arts Centre from Saturday, October 30, 2021.

Multidisciplinary artist Samson Young (b. 1979, Hong Kong; lives and works in Hong Kong) works in sound, performance, video and installation. In 2017, he represented Hong Kong at the 57th Venice Biennale. In 2020, he was awarded the inaugural Sigg Prize. His works are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Kadist, San Francisco.