Collaboration is a central tenet of Joan Jonas’s practice. For close to 20 years, she has performed with one of her most crucial collaborators: the celebrated pianist and musician Jason Moran, bringing his improvisational sounds into new performances and installations alike. Their interdisciplinary work together highlights the importance of feedback, improvisation, and music history across generations of artists.
In conjunction with the exhibition Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, Jonas and Moran present A Lecture Demonstration, a dialogue in which they describe their process and perform excerpts of their works together over the last two decades, including such landmark productions as Reanimation (2010/2012/2013), The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things (2004), and They Come to Us Without a Word (2015). A Lecture Demonstration is a video and sonic feedback between the two artists—an unscripted conversation, with Moran at the piano and Jonas on stage, performing with projected images from Jonas’s archive, props from her studio, and original audio recordings. Through space and sound, the narrative of their practice unfolds, revisiting years of collaboration, process, and close connection between a pair of artistic giants.
