Haseeb Ahmed (US,1985)
Residency period: July-December 2019
I set out to investigate the relationship between the wind and the landscape in and around Lake Geneva. This investigation played out for me in unexpected ways. The tremendous and quick moving storms that gathered over the lake in the summer months confronted me. The howling winds in the winter months that turned the lake into a raging sea struck a fear in me that I had not known for some time.
My attempt to reproduce the winds around Lake Geneva shifted from a more scientific representation to an emotive one that spoke directly to the senses. It took me a long time and lots of staring across the horizon to realize this.
A weather station I constructed with Pieter Heremans logged data for several months. Instead of merely visualizing this data, I found myself devising ways to reproduce those feelings created by the experience of the wind.
However, I recognised that my memory of the weather was intermingled with the memories of theatrical representations of storms from theatre and film. At the residency I read about the meaning of wind in film – as that which announces an upcoming, revolutionary, change.
From the means made to evoke the wind in theatre, I chose the wind machine – a cylindrical instrument that reproduces the sound of howling wind. Continuing my work with programmer Pieter Heremans, we devised a wind machine and linked it to the data from the weather station.
This is a means of playing back the weather like a wax cylinder or like one of Luc’s records would.
Living in Brussels, Haseeb Ahmed is a research-based artist. Exploring the theme of wind in his practice, he integrates methodologies from the hard sciences and collaborates with aeronautical engineers, physicists, philosophers and musicians to produce objects and site-specific installations. His work has been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Museum Bärengasse in Zürich and De Appel in Amsterdam. Currently, he continues his research by working with Prof. Craig Martin, who is writing a global history of wind at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.