Solange Knowles has premiered a video of a performance art piece at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The work, a record of a performance that exists primarily as a video but also as a sculptural stage contraption, is titled “Metatronia (Metatron’s Cube)” (2018), and for now lives exclusively on the Hammer’s website. The sculpture Solange created for the piece — an all-white stage of sorts that’s equal parts MC Escher, James Turrell, and Sol LeWitt — will travel to unconfirmed locations throughout the United States.
The performance features more than 50 dancers moving in and around pristine white platforms and Solange’s sculptural set in a verdant landscape, to a minimalist score she co-wrote with John Kirby. The dancers’ movements (choreographed by Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly) are reflective of contemporary dance, while the score is similarly atypical, evoking Philip Glass rather than anything off Solange’s most recent album, 2016’s gentle yet powerful A Seat at the Table. Solange neither appears nor is heard in the video.
“I’m excited about transitioning into creating larger scale works that have the duality of existing as part of a performance and then as a standalone sculpture that can be engaged with by the public,” Solange stated. “It was important to me to make the piece modular so that it can be quickly assembled in different landscapes allowing people to have individual interactions and experiences.”
“I think Solange’s piece offers a visual and sonic space for meditation, peace, and hopefulness,
A scene from Solange’s “Metatronia (Metatron’s Cube)” (2018)
which is a crucial counterpart to the images we often see of black bodies and other bodies of color in our current political climate,” stated Hammer Museum assistant curator Erin Christovale in an interview. “I also think she is challenging the associations we have with minimalism, in inserting her concepts into a space that is often associated with artists such as Donald Judd, Frank Stella, or Sol Lewitt. I’m excited to see how she continues her artistic trajectory in thinking holistically about what it means to be an artist and exploring all avenues of her practice, including dance, performance, music and now sculpture.”
In May of last year, Solange staged an arresting piece titled An Ode To at the Guggenheim Museum, which expanded her latest album into an evening-long performance. Last summer she showed Seventy States, a series of performances and projections, at Tate Modern; and in the fall, she staged a performance piece titled “Scales” (2017) at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Tex.
