To the Body, composed by Nico Muhly (2018 Resident, current Trustee), is an immersive soundscape created for Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust, an exhibition curated by Alexandra Munroe that is on view concurrently with the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. It is a work in ten sections, played without pause and repeated without seam, in which fragments of Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri (1680) appear, but are themselves disembodied from their original context. A soprano sings a line drawn from the original cantata over a bed of electronically manipulated sounds, Renaissance and Baroque instruments, and other voices. The primary musical and emotional elements are memory, contortion, and recontextualization; these act hand-in-hand with Yu Hong’s work, as well as in counterpoint to them.

To the Body receives its world premiere in Venice.

Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust is organized by Alexandra Munroe (current Trustee), senior curator at large for global arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition is a program of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Initiative that is supported by the museum’s Asian Art Circle.

Admission free and open to the public. To register, please email rsvp [at] yuhongvenice.com (rsvp[at]yuhongvenice[dot]com).