Heinali, the project of Ukrainian musician Oleh Shpudeiko, and Czech visual artist Olbram Pavlíček have collaborated on a new video based on the former’s composition ‘Aves Rubrae’.
You can watch the video above, which accompanies music that originally premiered last year at MoMA in New York, and was commissioned to mark one year since the invasion of Ukraine.
Heinali is also one of the artists supported through the SHAPE+ platform in 2023/2024. SHAPE+ is a three-year initiative co-funded by the European Union and supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
He and Pavlíček met during a residency hosted by the MeetFactory art centre in Prague in autumn 2023. In a statement, the latter said: "When I listened to Heinali’s track for the first time, the sound of organs inspired me to create a vertical video as an examination of spaces with seemingly random narrations. The video comprises three levels. The first one centres around the notion of unlocking, the second one focuses on monumentality, and the third one is an examination of a core. I projected some of my interests in sculpting and put seemingly unrelated objects together to create small side story lines."
Speaking about his approach to the music, Heinali said: "I perform my music using a modular synthesiser, which I set up or ‘patch’ based on artistic research incorporating medieval polyphonic techniques. My piece ‘Aves Rubrae’ which means ‘red birds’ in Latin, was also created using this patch. It was improvised and recorded in one take on my modular system as a commission for The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
"Like the organa tripla of the Notre Dame polyphony, it features three voices: two upper voices with intricate melodies generated by the machine scurrying over the slow-moving drones of the lower voice. However, unlike the Notre Dame polyphony, composed for grand church celebrations, ‘Aves Rubrae’ has an eschatological tone that I find more fitting, given the recent events. The piece references ‘Red Birds Will Fly Out Of The East And Destroy Paris In A Night’ (a title allegedly referencing one of the apocalyptic prophecies of Nostradamus) by Coil, paying homage to one of the most influential artists whose music shaped me during my teenage years."
