Missing links
He is often a physical presence in his own works, not just controlling and orchestrating the music, but playing instruments as well. The reason for this, more often than not, says the artist, "has to do with limitations of budget and time" rather than a desire to make an appearance. "I don't mind being a performer in my own piece, but if I had more resources and a bigger budget, I'd get more professional people to do it."
His composition for Music for 9 is bookended by Beethoven's Symphony No 9, though this may not be immediately discernible. The first rendition is simply the sound of hands clapping, keeping the rhythm of the score, while the second comprises sounds made by body parts articulating the musical movement.
"Symphony No 9 is Beethoven's last complete choral symphony, composed at a time when he was almost deaf. So there was a sense of incompleteness about it," GayBird points out. "I tried to interpret the piece by using sounds made by movement of body parts and without tonality,"
Even as this atonal piece, which, at least in parts, can sound like harsh and relentless clanging of metals, not unlike the sort heard in a shipbreaking yard, plays on a loop, a robot dog inside the aforementioned cage keeps pacing around, recording its surroundings, including visitor movement, using a camera on its back. The images are projected live on a wall. A two-channel video in the smaller exhibition room displays an animated unidentifiable mass floating across both screens. It is a composite made out of leftover footage from the videos on display in the main room, moving in sync with the amplified sound of the artist's own pounding heartbeat.
"There are multiple sources of moving images scattered all around the space - a bit like our everyday experiences these days," says GayBird, who believes visitors are likely to take away vastly different experiences from the exhibition.
And that is perhaps the point of the show. "Most of my works are meant to encourage the audience to think of their everyday existence in a different way, find more possibilities for themselves as well as the world. I prefer my audience to interpret my works any way they like."
There's still more to see and ponder about in Music for 9. For GayBird's elaborate ode to imperfection is made up of elements that, according to the artist, are "varied, disparate and incomplete and yet suggest some kind of a whole when presented in the same space".
