SPACE AS AN INSTRUMENT

By Holger Maik Mertin

Artist-in-residence at the Association for Visual Arts 2022

Echo concert strolls through the structure of the old Christiaan Barnard Hospital, in the heart of Cape Town CBD.

18 November at 18:00 & 19 November at 12:00 (noon)

Duration: 1 hour

Meeting point: the former hospital ER entrance, on 111 Bree Street.

Admission is free! (the artist believes that art events should have no barriers)

RSVP: admin@ava.co.za.

The concerts embody a wave of communication between sound & performance artist Holger Maik Mertin and the building itself - its basic, nowadays barren structures. The core of the building, which stretches from Bree to Loop St, between Shortmarket and Church Street, is the foundation for sound and movement, activated by performer and participants as they wander through different areas and floors of the building that most Capetonians know so well.

Using tools such as the floor, water puddles, windows, and sunbeams that draw pictures, Maik Mertin states: “I don’t alter the settings of a space. I respect the building, it’s history, and the people who inhabit it, now and in the past.”

Space as an Instrument was built on a one-month artistic research in different rooms and areas of the former City Park Hospital, observing and working with the environment, as in its architecture and its semantic structure. It invokes the history of the numerous rooms as well as the roles that these spaces could occupy in the future.

Contributors: Mirjam Asmal, Zweli Ntuli, Stefan Naudé, Volker Kühl

Holger Maik Mertin’s residency is supported by Kunststiftung NRW