Conversation | Nancy Holt: Circles of Light
On Sound and Light
Lisa Le Feuvre in Conversation with Susan Philipsz
Lisa Le Feuvre and Susan Philipsz, photo Philipsz: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
Nancy Holt is an artist who rethought what art can be and where it can be found. The voice is an important medium she articulated ideas of place and power with, drawing attention to the ways that we perceive. In this conversation curator Lisa Le Feuvre will think with artist Susan Philipsz about Holt’s use of sound, focusing on her film and video works and audio works and her attention to the sonic complexities of sculpture.
Over the course of five decades, Nancy Holt (1938–2014) explored how we perceive our environment and how we attempt to understand our place on the surface of this planet. Her artistic practice, writings and ideas built the ground from which many strands of contemporary art have grown. Lisa Le Feuvre and Susan Philipsz will delve deeper into Circles of Light, the artist’s most comprehensive survey exhibition in Germany to date, including film, video, photography, sound works, concrete poetry, sculptures and expansive installations as well as drawings and documentation from over 25 years.
Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer and editor. She is inaugural Executive Director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, the artist-endowed foundation dedicated to the creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Between 2010 and 2017, Le Feuvre was Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute, directing the research component and leading educational programmes, research, collections, publications and exhibitions focused on sculptural thinking. She has curated more than sixty exhibitions as an institutional and independent curator.
Susan Philipsz’s work deals with the spatial properties of sound and with the relationship between sound and architecture. She is particularly interested in the emotive and psychological properties of sound and how it can be used as a device to alter individual consciousness. Philipsz uses sound as a medium in public spaces to trigger the listeners’ awareness, temporarily altering their perception of themselves in a particular place and time.