Performance: LABOUR. dispersion of subjectivity

Artists: LABOUR (Farahnaz Hatam & Colin Hacklander)

Percussionist: Yi-Ping Yang – Les Percussions de Strasbourg

Curators: Léon Kruijswijk, assisted by Nicole Wittmann

Organised by: Mudam Luxembourg

In collaboration with:

rainy days festival  

Philharmonie Luxembourg   

Luxembourg Art Week

The newly commissioned performance dispersion of subjectivity by LABOUR unfolds as a sonic dramaturgy throughout Mudam’s spaces. Working site-specifically, the Berlin-based duo – consisting of Farahnaz Hatam and Colin Hacklander – enables innovative ways to approach the notion of ‘deep listening’ and observe their surroundings. The artists draw on psychoacoustics to explore how the museum’s architecture resonates with the visitor’s hearing capacity.

In the performance, musicians will shift positions while noise and music drift throughout the spaces. As the surfaces catch and reflect these sounds, Mudam turns into a resonant, multi-chambered music box that unsettles attempts to locate their source. The shimmering metallic tones of two sixxens – microtonal percussion instruments – anchor a sonic turbulence that oscillates between the identifiable and the unintelligible, the grounded and the piercing, the bright and the dark.

This hallucinatory composition is amplified by visual elements. Through an allegory and a profusion of signs, LABOUR playfully critiques the priority often given to sight above other senses – an entrenched bias since the advent of the written word – and asks whether we can trust what we see. Ultimately, dispersion of subjectivitytackles the embedded nature of events – the relationality between phenomena – questioning whether we truly perceive what we actually see and hear.

Organised by Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in collaboration with the 2025 rainy days festival of the Philharmonie Luxembourg and Luxembourg Art Week

Biography

LABOUR is a Berlin-based duo composed of Farahnaz Hatam and Colin Hacklander. Together they create sound-based works. Collaborating since 2013, they founded LABOUR in 2018 with a work titled next time, die consciously. Their work has been presented all over the world, including at Donaueschinger Musiktage, Gropius Bau Berlin, Kraftwerk Berlin, Sharjah Biennial, Art Basel, Julia Stoschek Foundation Berlin, Grand National Theatre Dakar, EMΣT National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens and Berghain in Berlin. Their music has been released by labels such as Kuboraum Editions, Honest Jon’s and their own imprint studio LABOUR. They regularly collaborate with others for theatre plays, performance and video works, and fashion projects. They were residents at Villa Aurora Los Angeles, are long-term residents of Callie’s shared sound studio in Berlin and they have a monthly radio show on NTS.