Night of Ideas: KADIST presents Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis’ 'Five Hundred Twenty-Four' (2022)

Night of Ideas: KADIST presents Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis’ Five Hundred Twenty-Four (2022)

Night of Ideas is a global marathon of philosophical debates and artistic performances coordinated by the French Institute Paris and Villa Albertine in the United States, taking place in more than 50 cities in the United States in 2023 and +100 countries around the world. Join us for a marathon of talks, performances, food, art and collective imagination.

This year’s edition brings together dozens of local cultural organizations, leading thinkers and artists to contemplate the theme will “More ever be enough?”

Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis’ ‘Five Hundred Twenty-Four’ (2022), 30:18 mins
Screening: March 4, 2023, 11 pm
Location: The MIX Teen Center, 2nd floor at the San Francisco Public Library’s Main Branch

Five Hundred Twenty-Four is a single-channel video installation by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, featuring singers from over twenty Cleveland-area choirs counting numbers in an iterative process. This work marks the formation and dissipation of a new group made up of pre-existing groups who usually operate separately behind closed doors in different corners of the region. Although the singers may have not been all in the same room, they become one collective musical body through the artists’ digital efforts—a way of fostering community many have become comfortable with through the COVID-19 pandemic. While the piece is sung with a collective voice, every individual is uniquely tasked to begin and end counting at their specific number. The score is a roll call, an audit, a measurement performed by the measured. It takes on wider relevance as a mobilization of disparate communities amid a time of social fragmentation in the United States. Concluding with a threshold choir who sing the final numbers of the sequence, the work speaks to larger cycles of life, death, and renewal.

The work was commissioned for FRONT International 2022, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art and is a recent KADIST acquisition.