Charlie Morrow: A Gathering

The title is borrowed from A Gathering of Healers, the publication for an eponymous event that Morrow organised in New York in 1977 and that is about to be re-released by Kohta and Recital, Los Angeles.

Morrow (US, 1942, lives in Helsinki and Vermont) is a composer, sound artist and sound specialist, poet, graphic artist, events organiser and much more. He has called himself ‘multi-hatted’ (although always wearing his signature bowler hat) and a ‘frame-maker’, authoring a dazzling multitude of works and events, from intimate breathing chants to city-wide musical extravaganzas.

Morrow’s exhibition at Kohta will be a compressed survey, with new audio-visual work (including sound and site-specific drawing) and selections from his vast archive kept in Barton, Vermont, and spanning more than six decades.

In the 1960s Morrow was involved in New York’s music and art scene, collaborating with Charlotte Moorman on her yearly Avant Garde Festival. In the 1970s he and poet Jerome Rothenberg launched The New Wilderness Foundation, which among other things published EAR magazine and organised a long series of summer solstice concerts around the world.

The exhibition at Kohta will be accompanied by concerts and re-enacted performances in the surrounding Teurastamo area:

On Wednesday, 21 October, the evening of the opening, Morrow’s Serenade ii, a piece for tenor, French horn, keyboard/guitar and recorded soundscapes will be performed at Kunsthalle Kohta.

In the first week of November, a re-enactment of A Gathering of Healers will happen at Mad House Helsinki, the performance art space at Teurastamo with which Kunsthalle Kohta regularly collaborates.

On Monday, 21 December, the day of the Winter Solstice, Morrow will stage a 2020 version of the solstice events he used to organise annually during the heyday of the New Wilderness Foundation, involving all time zones in a live-streamed online event, again hosted by Mad House Helsinki.