Marina Rosenfeld
Biography
Marina Rosenfeld is an American composer, musician and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Working across the disciplinary boundaries of music, performance and visual art, she has created a body of work interrogating the fundamental conditions of music, especially its staging, reception, and modes of inscription. Her works span sound, music and performance, sculpture, drawing and installation. Since her renowned feminist composition the Sheer Frost Orchestra in 1993, Rosenfeld has created works for the Museum of Modern Art, the Park Avenue Armory, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Dia Foundation, and the Fondacion Serralves among many others, and participated in surveys of contemporary art and music including the Whitney Biennial (2002 and 2008), the PERFORMA Biennial of Performance (2009 and 2011), the Montréal Biennial (2016), the Aurora Biennial (2020), the inaugural Biennale Son (Switzerland, 2023) and ‘Every Time A Ear di Soun,’ the radio program of Documenta14. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions by institutions including Museum Art.Plus (The Agonists, 2023), Radicants Paris (Undreaming the Dream House, 2023), Kunsthaus Baselland (We'll start a fire, 2021), The Artist's Institute (Music Stands, 2019), Portikus Frankfurt (Deathstar, 2017), and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (After Notation, 2016), and in contemporary music festivals including the Holland Festival, Borealis, Ultima, Wien Modern, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Musica Strasbourg, Borderlines, and Tectonics, among many others.
Rosenfeld's genre-spanning works have been performed internationally in site-specific stagings, especially the Sheer Frost Orchestra (a 30th-anniversary performance will be in Luxembourg in 2024) and her groundbreaking performance-installation Teenage Lontano (2008), her "cover version" for 34 teenaged vocalists of György Ligeti's modernist orchestral masterpiece Lontano. Teenage Lontano has been staged in New York, Amsterdam, Oslo, Perth, Strasbourg and most recently in Ghent in 2023. Rosenfeld's Deathstar and Deathstar Orchestration (both 2017) were restaged for the Biennale Son (Sion) in 2023 as a durational (48-hour) solo performance-installation for Disklavier, featuring longtime-collaborator, pianist Marino Formenti. Her works My Body (2019) (a commission of Yarn/Wire ensemble) and A Lesser Privacy (commission of Ensemble Contrechamps), were also integrated into an evening-length presentation for Festival La Bâtie, Geneva and Musica, Strasbourg, both 2023. Greatest Hits, also a durational work ,featuring percussionists/drummers Eli Keszler and Greg Fox, was recorded in 2018 at PS1 MoMA and released in 2024 on the INFO label (as Greatest Hits, INFO/Berlin).
Rosenfeld's other solo recordings are on Room40 (Teenage Lontano, 2021; Index, 2021; theforestthegardenthesea (reissue), 2020; joy of fear (reissue), 2020; P.A./HARD LOVE. featuring cellist Okkyung Lee and vocalist Annette Henry aka Warrior Queen, 2013; Plastic Materials, 2009; and on Shelter Press, Deathstar, 2020. Ensemble recording projects include Sour Mash, a duo with George Lewis (Innova); Leaving, Vertice and Feel Anything with Ben Vida (901Editions and iDEAL Recordings); and DJTrio with Christian Marclay, DJ Olive and Toshio Kajiwara (Asphodel), among others.
Rosenfeld has also maintained a practice as an improviser using original dub plates (acetate LPs) since the late nineties, with collaborators too numerous to list, but including live performance as part of the Merce Cunningham Company’s Events between 2004 and 2008. Also in the domain of music for dance, Rosenfeld has created three evening-length scores for choreographer Maria Hassabi between 2016 and 2018 that were presented at MoMA, Centre Pompidou, the Walker Art Cener, ICA Boston and many others, and for choreographer and interdisciplinary artist Ralph Lemon (2014-2015), for Scaffold Room, seen at Bard College, the Kitchen and the Walker Art Center.
Rosenfeld teaches in Brooklyn College's Sonic Arts masters program and has lectured widely on her practice, including at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Université Paris 8, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Darmstadt Internationales Musikinstitut, Rutgers, Cornell, University of Toronto, Queensland University, NABA Milan, UCLA, The New School, and in 2023, at the Dia Foundation in New York, where she delivered one of that institutions “Artists on Artists” lectures, exploring the legacy of the art of Marian Zazeela.
