The previous ‘After Abstraction’ event last month went down a hit and we are excitedly awaiting the second event later this week. Join us on Friday the 17th of March from 5pm for this multi sensorial and multimedia performance featuring art, panel, and participation at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge where you will become part of the exhibition.


Ruth Rix, House, House, 2016, 92 x 72 cm, oil on canvas


An exploration of space, real and imagined, in times of movement and migration, Rix’s work spurs connections with poetry, literature, history and music. An immersive music performance encourages the audience to discover art in space, to fathom meaning through sound in a room.

The performance is produced and co-directed by CDH Research Fellow Dr Annja Neumann. The event will partly take place in the Robert Cripps Gallery of the award-winning New Library space of Magdalene College, which has famously been characterised as ‘settled’. By contrast, the artworks by Helga Michie and Ruth Rix ask questions about the very nature of a ‘settled status’. The event combines an immersive music experience with a panel discussion on the lived experience of migration and movement in Europe in this very moment.

In the experimental performance, paintings interconnect with music and an exhibition meets its creation process. Inhabiting the exhibition space, a vocal ensemble led by Syamala Roberts and Lea Luka Sikau interprets musical works that inspired Rix while she worked in her atelier, ranging from Ariel Ramírez’s Missa Criolla to the choral music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The repertoire will include the world premiere of a composition by Nat Jobbins that she created in response to Rix’s paintings. The performance moves painting and music ‘beyond the lines’, touching upon the repercussions and resonances of Anglo-German history and poetry.

5pm, 17 March 2023, Robert Cripps Gallery, Magdalene College Cambridge

Tickets can be booked via the Cambridge Festival website: https://www.festival.cam.ac.uk/events/cross-connections-discovering-living-space


Pictures of first event, taken by photographer Faruk Kara who is working experimentally with intentional camera movement, emphasising the digital dimension to the project.

  • Posted 15 Mar 2023

Cambridge Digital Humanities

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