Ben Apfelbaum

ALLORA AND CALZADILLA : VARIATIONS ON ‘ODE TO JOY’

As part of  the Making Art Public – 50 years of Kaldor Public\ Art Projects, the Art Gallery of New South Wales is bringing to life some of those projects.

In this case it was Project 26. The full title of this recreation is Stop,repair, prepare: variations on ‘Ode to joy” for a prepared piano which  has never before been . seen in Sydney but was performed in Melbourne in 2012.

There is nothing more startling than walking into the entrance court of the Art Gallery to see a Dali-esque scene of a man seemingly amputated from the waist down emerging from a modified Bechstein grand piano playing variations on Beethoven’s Joy whilst the keyboard was upside down from the pianist’s point of view.

There are in fact a group of especially trained pianists and this piece was performed by Riley Irwin.

Even  more startling is that the pianist pushes the grand piano around the entire entrance court.

Italians Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla create works which are sometimes characterised by their sense of playfulness and use  of humour, very much in evidence in this piece.

The piano itself is on loan for the Kaldor Project from the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy.

For further information on forthcoming events visit 50 years.kaldorartprojects.org.au

Published by Ben Apfelbaum

My photography began when my father handed me the proverbial brownie box camera as a child. As cameras developed I went through Fujica and Olympus range finders graduating to my first single lens reflex camera, the Minolta SRT101, the latter being the greatest facilitator to my growth as a photographer. Digital photography has only added to this. I was a regular contributor to Camera Craft magazine (Australian Camera ) for over three years. During Australia’s Bicentennial year (1988) I made it a personal project to document the celebrations. This culminated in the creation of a book of my photos which was published in 1989. The book was called CELEBRATING AUSTRALIA and came with an accompanying calendar. My works have appeared in a number of publications including the coffee book entitled MY AUSTRALIA (1989), publisher Robertsbridge Severn. This book had a preface by the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke. I was a co-photographer on a book entitled SYDNEY- DISCOVER THE CITY with text written by Robert Treborlang. Major Mitchell Press was the publisher. Also for two years I was the photographer for calendars celebrating Sydney’s multicultural communities. The two calendars were entitled MULTICULTURAL SYDNEY. My work appeared in a group exhibition held at Sydney’s Town Hall pertaining to the diversity of life in South America to raise money for orphanages there. I have over one hundred photos stored in the New South Wales State Library archive. I had a solo exhibition held in 2007 entitled Ben’s Lens at the Sydney Jewish Museum which celebrated the vibrancy of the Sydney Jewish community. Some of these photos are on the Museum’s permanent display. I have exhibited internationally firstly at the Spruill Gallery in Atlanta Georgia, United States, and in an exhibition entitled Kosher and Co at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Currently I am a regular contributor to J-Wire and this esteemed publication. To celebrate the opening of a permanent Photography Gallery, the State Library of New South Wales selected 400 shots from its archive of over 2,000,000 images to display in the new gallery. An image of mine was plucked out of the multi million photo archive to be part of the inaugural exhibition.