Wednesday, May 7th at 8pm EST, ISSUE Project Room and curatorial platform Time Based are pleased to stream a new collaboration between Brooklyn-based musician Madison Greenstone and Kyiv-based installation artist Anton Saenko. The duo’s new work will be available on ISSUE’s website and Time Based's YouTube channel (4pm EET) as part of ongoing activations of the Distant Pairs Series. Throughout May 2025, ISSUE and Time Based will co-present three digital commissions uniting artists based in Kyiv and New York. Working through the simultaneity of war and multiple crises, these three pairs engage in a collaborative creation that highlights physical distance - yet reveals a deeply layered interdependence.
Labyrinth of Gazes is a kinetic sound installation devised collaboratively and draws from ongoing conversations about the cyclicality of return, the inherent difference in repetition and recurrence, Paul Klee’s angels, the destructive processes of history, and the presence of circles (metaphorical and literal) in each of the artists’ practices. Labyrinth of Gazes rotates as a moon-like presence, coolly bearing witness throughout the course of its movement, influencing without intervening, an uncontainable form creating blindspots and interferences.
Madison and Anton are grateful to Serafyma Brig for her invaluable role as translator.
Madison Greenstone is a musician, writer, and clarinetist of TAK Ensemble. Their solo practice, exstatic resonances, explores ‘shatteringly intense’ phenomenological, material and spatial expressivities of sound through richly noisy timbral actions, often performed on the clarinet at a high volume. This work was released to critical acclaim on Relative Pitch Records in 2023. Recently their music explores dreamlike acoustic mirages, spatial interferences of difference tones and beating, and draws inspiration from fiction writer Yoko Tawada's proposition that there is no such thing as a room with a fixed size. Madison performs across the US and internationally as a soloist and chamber musician. They have been presented by the New York Philharmonic, Blank Forms, Cafe Oto (UK), LAMPO, KM28 (DE), ISSUE Project Room, the Vigeland Mausoleum (NO), Night of Surprise (DE), and Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center. As a writer, Madison has contributed critical essays on experimental music to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (k-verlag), Blank Forms (Alien Roots), Museum of Art and History in Neuchâtel, Contemporary Music Review, and LAMPO Publications. They can be heard on Important Records, Relative Pitch, Longform Editions, Mengi, Another Timbre, Greyfade, Wandelweiser Editions, Impakt Kollektiv among others.
Anton Saenko, originally from Sumy, now based in Kyiv, is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, photography, performance, and land art. His practice explores the intersections of space, materiality, and perception. A graduate of the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (2019), he also studied at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts and Method Fund courses. In 2018, he was a Gaude Polonia resident in Poland. His solo exhibitions include Griazne (Dymchuk Gallery, Kyiv, 2021), Phantom (The Naked Room, Kyiv, 2020), and Dark Space (Closer, Kyiv, 2015). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Point of View (Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, 2018, curated by Waldemar Tatarchyk) and Into the Dark (32 Vozdvizhenka Arts House, Kyiv, 2016, curated by Hudrada). His work has also been featured in major art events such as the Second Biennale of Young Art (Kharkiv, 2019), the international land art symposium in Mogrytsia (2019), and the Festival of Young Ukrainian Artists at Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv, 2017). In 2023, Anton received the Special Pinchuk Art Prize, and in 2024, he participated in La Biennale di Venezia.
