Wu Tsang: Anthem

A vast audiovisual installation from filmmaker Wu Tsang has been announced for New York’s Guggenheim Museum this summer. ‘Wu Tsang: Anthem’ was conceived in collaboration with composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland, and will combine moving image and sound to transform the Guggenheim’s cathedral-like rotunda into a sonic sculptural space.

At the heart of the installation is an eighty-four-foot curtain sculpture with a film portrait of Glenn-Copeland projected upon it. The intention, says Tsang, is to weave the musician’s compositions into a larger tapestry of sounds around the museum’s circular walkway. By combining Glenn-Copeland’s ambiguous vocal timbres with changing ambient sounds and other heterogeneous textures, the installation will build a complex soundscape into the architecture of the museum.

Tsang’s work, previously seen at venues like the Tate Modern, frequently explores the “in-betweenness” of ideas that cannot be discussed in binary terms. Among her best-known works is 2012 short film ‘Wildness’, which documented a Los Angeles bar patronised by a predominantly Latino LGBT community since 1963. Glenn-Copeland, meanwhile, is renowned for the new age music he penned as a woman in the ‘70s and ‘80s, which went largely undiscovered until after his gender transition in the early ‘00s.

‘Wu Tsang: Anthem’ runs until September 6th, 2021 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.