Allora & Calzadilla: Intervals

The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) will present Allora & Calzadilla: Intervals, the largest solo exhibition in the United States to date by the Puerto Rico-based collective.

This exhibition of new and recent projects by Puerto Rico-based artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla explores music’s capacity to evoke an ancestral time and to interrogate what makes us human. Through live performances, films, sound, and sculpture, the artists take on various notions of the interval—the time between events, the measure between two points in space, or the range between musical notes—in order to discover possible ways to reconsider the distance between our present and our past. The exhibition unfolds over two sites: the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Fabric Workshop and Museum.

Each Allora & Calzadilla work on view stems from a cultural artifact or a vibrant remainder from various moments in history—whether the remains of nineteenth-century elephants, the fragmented bones of dinosaurs, a prehistoric figurine, or the oldest musical instrument ever discovered. Choral and orchestral performances reimagine concerts from another century, and an intimate vocal score produces a new friction between human presence and the prehistoric past. As archaeological exercises that unsettle linear time, the works in this exhibition wrestle with the abyss that lies between the human experience and our evolving place within the larger universe.