Press Release
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary celebrates Istanbul’s art program in the framework of European Capital of Culture 2010 with the sonic pavilion The Morning Line by Matthew Ritchie and Aranda\Lasch. The Morning Line - an impressive 8 meter high and 20 meter long pavilion, built of 17 tons of black coated aluminum - explores the disciplinary interplays between art, architecture, music, mathematics, cosmology, and science. New York based artist Matthew Ritchie - listed by Time magazine as of of the great innovators for the new millenium - celebrates the amazing location of The Morning Line at famous Eminönü Square just in front of the Spice Bazar:
‘Istanbul is the perfect venue for The Morning Line: the calligraphic design of the structure represents a contemporary version of the sacred geometry found in byzantine and ottoman architecture. As an emerging urban focus for the 21st century and a uniquely layered historic site, Istanbul offers a truly global audience for the sonic spaces and layered narratives of the work.’
The Morning Line was conceived by Matthew Ritchie as an inherently collaborative structure, an interdisciplinary platform for information congruence, where artists, architects, engineers, physicists and musicians would each contribute their own specialized information to create a new form; a mutable structure, with multiple expressions and narratives intertwining in its physical structure, projected video and innovative spatialized sound environments. The structure can be broken down, shipped and installed to multiple locations, and is capable of being radically reconfigured for different venues and of adapting to a changing program of contemporary music.
Ritchie’s own decade long artistic project of constructing a personal cosmology that incorporates the languages of science, myth and religion into a single systemic or ‘semasiographic’ visual language became a substrate for encoding these multiple narratives in a three dimensional structural system, in collaboration with Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch of Aranda\Lasch and Daniel Bosia of Arup AGU.
