MOCA Pacific Design Center
This exhibition, the first in North America dedicated to Iannis Xenakis's original works on paper, includes more than sixty rarely seen musical scores, architectural drawings, conceptual renderings, and samplings of the composer’s innovative graphic notation produced between 1953 and 1984. Xenakis trained as an engineer and worked as an architect with Le Corbusier before becoming one of the most important figures in late 20th-century experimental music, inspiring the use of complex mathematical and architectonic concepts in his groundbreaking electronic compositions.
The exhibition is accompanied by an ambitious schedule of public programs, concerts, and symposia around the city, including a presentation of Xenakis’s pioneering, site-specific, land art spectacle, Polytope de Persepolis at the Los Angeles State Historic Park; a rare performance of the composer’s only opera, Oresteia; and a virtual reality recreation of La Poème Electronique (1958), a temporary audiovisual composition created for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair.
The exhibition traveled from The Drawing Center, New York, to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and MOCA Pacific Design Center.
Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary is organized by Sharon Kanach, Carey Lovelace, and The Drawing Center, New York.