Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and Guildhouse together with Adelaide Festival Centre announce Michael Kutschbach as inaugural artist for new Collections Project

Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s (ASO) Managing Director Vincent Ciccarello today announced that multi-media artist Michael Kutschbach will undertake the inaugural Guildhouse Collections Project with the ASO, supported by the City of Adelaide. 

In the coming months, as the first artist appointed in this collaboration, Michael will observe the ASO as a living collection, distinct from a collection of artefacts, and will create an analogous, sensory experience in response. The resulting video will be presented on large screens at the Adelaide Festival Centre and various venues in the City of Adelaide in 2021. 

Michael, whose work encompasses drawing, sculpture, installation, painting, video and sound, says, “It’s an interesting project for an artist. Other Collections Projects have tended to look at archives within art institutions. Not only is this one asking a visual artist to enter the world of an orchestra, but it also asks one to consider the ASO as a living archive, and not an archive of stored artefacts. What exactly a living archive might be is certainly a very interesting thing to consider. “ 

“At the end of the residency, I hope that I can produce a work that reflects an experience of a multi-sensory activity. The ASO, as I now imagine it, is this collective of interdependent, highly specialised creative individuals, who work together to offer up a unified sensory experience that goes way beyond what we may be able to articulate with words.” 

“My aim is not to illustrate this idea of the ASO but to use the encounter with it to develop and foster an analogous experience within the realm of materials and the moving image.”