ISSUE's 2021 season programs are FREE to stream. In lieu of purchasing tickets, please consider making a $25 suggested donation (or an amount that you feel is meaningful) in support of ISSUE's With Womens Work series and Artist Fund. Enabling the fullscreen function is recommended. The length of this piece is approximately 20 minutes.
Wednesday, April 28th, at 8pm EST, ISSUE is pleased to stream A Spark of Haelegen (Ave Maria), a new work by composer, musician, artist, and philosopher Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. The piece is part of the With Womens Work series, commissioning artists to interpret and respond to scores included in Womens Work, a magazine first edited and self-published in 1975 by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood.
Notes from Hunter Hunt-Hendrix on A Spark of Haelegen (Ave Maria):
In the score for her work Fantasy and Self-Transformation, Jacki Apple seems to suggest that a fantasy, if given the opportunity to incubate within a staged hurqalya, can, through a mysterious coagulation of its own passion, produce the objective circumstance that would satisfy it. Fantasy can create a reality, or at least the distinction between the two can break down.
When scaled to infinity, it follows from this insight that heaven can be achieved on earth by a steady, rigorous and all-encompassing art project animated by authentic apocalyptic thirst.
My multimedia work A Spark of Haelegen (Ave Maria) is born of an attempt to scale Apple’s insight in this way. I propose that Haelegen (my name for heaven) will be a celestial city governed by four new fundamental human rights: Sovereignty, Hierarchy, Emancipation and Individuation. A Spark of Haelegen presents a consolidated instantiation of these speculative rights, each rendered through the exercise of the theo-anthropic talent proper to it: music, philosophy, drama, and architecture (respectively).
This is my first attempt at combining these disparate creative modes in a single piece, a miniature of my ongoing practice, as it were: a musical composition/performance, a prophetic homily, a dramatic vignette - all presented successively as a short film - together with a simple supplementary video game.
I structure the work according to a creative rule system which I call Perichoresis, the four operations of which (Siphoning, Coalescence, Arrogation, Catalysis) are meant to foster its consistency as a vital and imbricated construction. The function of this construction is to harvest the omnipresent yet elusive Laet of the Blessed Virgin, whom I call OIOION, and convert it into a more palpable substance that can interact with the cluster of narratives, institutions and affects that comprise the unredeemed world we know. I believe this effort is resonant with the line from Apple’s score, “Permit anticipations to become experiences, observing the point at which ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ collide or merge.”
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix is a composer, musician, artist, and philosopher who seeks in her practice to combine these disciplines in synthetic unity. Her music under the name Liturgy has been widely acclaimed for its sincere ecstatic energy and its meticulous fusion of vernacular, traditional and experimental forms. She started Liturgy as a bedroom black metal project in 2004 while studying philosophy and avant-garde composition at Columbia, and released a debut EP, Immortal Life, in 2007. In 2009 she first presented her prophetic and philosophical orientation in the treatise "Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism" in tandem with Liturgy's debut full-length Renihilation. In 2011, the band made waves globally with their sophomore album Aesthethica for introducing the style of black metal into the world of experimental art rock. Their ambitious 2015 album The Ark Work was controversial for its incorporation of IDM and trap production. In 2016, Hunt-Hendrix established the philosophical arkwork.org website, followed by the 2017 release of the electronic album New Introductory Lectures on the System of Transcendental Qabala under the moniker Kel Valhaal. In the fall of 2018, she presented her metaphysical video opera Origin of the Alimonies at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, performed by Liturgy together with a chamber ensemble. In 2019, she began her ongoing YouTube lecture series - where she discusses topics ranging from theology to transgender politics - in tandem with the release of H.A.Q.Q., Liturgy's fourth studio album. Following a 2019 live-action rendition of Origin
