'All at Once' and 'Will You Be There?' Online Shows During COVID-19

Two Columbia artists are featured in All at Once, an online exhibit hosted by the Fridman Gallery in New York. Adjunct professor Tamar Ettun and current Sound Art student Julian Day both have work in this group exhibition.

Ettun’s work Lilith Falling (demon drawings series), comes with an interactive offer to “Text the empathetic demon at: 833-575-1049.” Day’s contribution is a video titled Together We Breathe - edit - 5, which shows the Library of Birmingham being filled with a hundred brass players. This is a collaboration with Super Critical Mass, an art project conceived by Day.

All at Once’s curator Regine Basha writes that the purpose of this show is to document consciousness and its collective capabilities as we all go through a global pandemic. “Consider the works as a curated ‘image bank’ bringing images, video and sound relating to this meandering rumination about consciousness, collective consciousness, shared psychic trauma and speculative healing.”

All at Once ends June 21.

Day also has work in Will You Be There?, an ongoing show hosted by the School of Visual Arts. This show is a virtual exhibition exploring the precariousness and necessity of togetherness, particularly in moments of exigency relating to the current pandemic.

Day contributes to the show with Cohort (2020), a video, produced also with Super Critical Mass. The curators of this show write, in the catalogue, that Cohort embodies the struggle between the simultaneous existence of the individual within the collective.

“In Cohort, sound, space, and social relations overlap to create a temporary and intangible experience: an open, abstract sound mass that unites the many different identities of those who choose to participate and celebrates their unique vocal architectures. But the ‘living together’ witnessed in this performance is a temporary, heterogenous one. While occupying the temporality of this performance, participants share a common goal. But all who participate do not reach it in similar ways. The difference in tone, range, and vocal texture is not diluted into the common condition of creating harmonious sounds.”

Will You Be There? is an ongoing exhibit, available online indefinitely.