Julien Grossmann - Customs and Claims

Sculptural sound works played the leading role in this first solo exhibition in the Netherlands by Julien Grossmann. The artist ingeniously transforms musical instruments and sound equipment, uses sound recordings from the early 20th century to the present, and makes astute connections to histories of culture and globalisation. The exhibition offered as much an auditory experience as a visual one.

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Julien Grossmann (Metz, 1983) was trained in both music and the visual arts. Musical fragments, scales, and keys are his basic ingredients, which he uses to address topics such as culture and globalisation. The number of musical scales in the world is as diverse as the number of languages. Grossmann plays with the ability of sound, however abstract, to immediately recall a connotation to a particular place and cultural context.

Building on the idea that sound is an immaterial testimony of cultural and economic dynamics, Grossmann uses instruments closely linked to the histories of empowerment and emancipation, or borrows songs that resound global tensions. But he also manipulates and distorts sound, changes the tonality of instruments, and builds his own music players and audio sources. As such, he plays with the associations related to certain sounds, and gives materials that have a significant impact on the world’s cultural and economic relations, such as crude oil, an uncomfortable resonance.

Parallel to his sound installations, Grossmann presented a new work, Growth Products, that examined the iconography of the globalised economy. This installation composed of fertilizer bags zoomed in on the peculiar use of mythological figures and ancient symbols of progress, power and wealth in the fertilizer packaging.