Naama Tsabar: Play with Me

Often repurposing parts of existing instruments, Naama Tsabar builds new ones: sculptures and architectural interventions, sized to her body, that act as experimental vectors for sound and performance. Presented in shows just as likely to generate an LP as an exhibition catalogue (Perimeters, her 2021 exhibit at Miami Beach’s Bass Museum, yielded a hybrid vinyl-catalogue), these works oscillate between object and event as they are activated by gallerygoers, the artist and her collaborators.

When I visit Tsabar at her Brooklyn studio, the Tel Aviv-born artist is reconfiguring arrangements of deconstructed violin and viola bows that hang from nails in the drywall – the beginnings of a new project, she tells me. Moving with the dexterity of a lawless archetier, she sketches in space, exploring different visual compositions as she repositions the bows on the nails or adjusts the sliding mechanisms that tighten and slacken the hair. “I’ve been looking for bows where the horsehair is synthetic or sourced humanely, rather than being a byproduct of butchering,” she says as she experiments. “The violence inherent to the tools that we use to make music really makes you think about classical music in a different way.”

In her work, Tsabar, whose first institutional solo exhibition in Germany opens at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin this March, eschews or subverts various violences in music. The artist, who got her start in a punk band, is attuned to the historical marginalisation of women musicians in genres like punk and rock, the devaluation of ancillary or supportive labour in the industry at large and an endemic emphasis on mastery and hierarchy at the expense of experimentation and collaboration. Her art imagines otherwise.

Tsabar’s handsome performance objects, which often feature readily activatable musical strings, demand to be played with, to be touched. They encourage a generative mode of sensory engagement that art institutions are wont to proscribe due to some combination of concern about archival (or financial) damage and an industry-wide opticalcentrism. Scholars Constance Classen and David Howes have described how the rise of the public art museum in the nineteenth century engendered new etiquette prohibiting touch, geared towards working-class visitors; this dovetailed with Western frameworks that deemed touch an ‘uncivilised’ sense and elevated sight for its connections to scientific ideology and capitalist display. Tsabar is among the artists today – many of whom are interested in challenging sensory or social hierarchies – whose work questions this dogma.