AMADOUR: Hello Naama! Your work is outstanding. I’ve seen your work for many years now. I’m your fan.
NAAMA TSABAR: Thank you so much.
AMADOUR: I was introduced to your work at Art Basel Miami Beach two years ago at Shulamit Nazarian’s booth. I saw your work, and I remember that’s when I met Seth Curcio at the gallery too. He showed me how your works function sonically, and it is incredible.
TSABAR: I’m happy you got to see the booth. Did you check out the Bass Museum that year? I had a large, ambitious project called Perimeters. It had a few bodies of work, and one of the focuses was on a blue body of work called Inversions that I showed in the generous space. It was a solo show with pieces embedded in walls. The architecture in the room itself had these kinds of holes in different shapes, and the outside of the holes were finished like an acoustic guitar. You had all this inlay and luthier-like language, but then you could enter the gaps with your limbs. By doing so, visitors could activate holes through motion. A hand’s sheer penetration into the wall triggered a sound file that changed if you moved your hand inside the cavity. Some of them had strings behind the wall that you didn’t see, but you could play, and the space of the wall became like an acoustic chamber.
AMADOUR: Amazing! I want to take it back to the very beginning. What was your driving force with music and sound, and how was that shaped in your childhood?
TSABAR: That’s a good question. I grew up in a household of music lovers. None of us are professional musicians, meaning my parents and brothers. Music was always around when I was growing up, and somebody was always singing. We all played several instruments growing up. My oldest brother became a classically trained Indian singer and played sitar, teaching and performing for a few years. In my late teens, I played electric guitar and classical and jazz piano for quite a few years.
AMADOUR: How lovely.
TSABAR: I went to art school right after high school for my BFA in art. At that time I lived in Tel Aviv. I was playing in bands with electric guitar and backup vocals in this electro-punk feminist band. It was the years when Le Tigre was massive. We would perform on small stages and sweaty clubs to get a feel for everything that happens to facilitate a performance. Whether it be lights, the sound system, the camper’s tape, or cables, all this language provided a more extended time-contained experience. I found it all very interesting. I also bartered at a club with daily shows in the same years. I learned from the lighting designer and the sound tech, and those years were formative for me in the sense that I got exposed to how things are constructed and function. My thesis show for my BFA was the first work where I transformed space into an architectural instrument. It started early, with this interest in fusing architecture, mechanisms, sculpture, and interactivity.
AMADOUR: What music did you grow up listening to in your household?
TSABAR: I was first really fascinated with female voices, to be honest. I remember the music playing from my brothers’ rooms, which drew me in, like singers PJ Harvey, Susan Vega, Tori Amos, and Björk. This was the nineties. I also learned about Patty Smith and Janice Joplin, and I was like a rock grunge kid.
AMADOUR: Going back to architecture, what experiences have you had with architecture in life that inform your practice?
TSABAR: I don’t know where you are right now, but I’m in a friend’s apartment in Tel Aviv, and the walls around me communicate with my body, and my receptors have been picking up these notions throughout my life regarding space. I am interested in how we take things for granted, which informs my material choices. For instance, the utilitarian aspects rise to the surface by using gaffer’s tape. I’m also interested in how my practice can highlight the body, our experiences, or the viewer’s bodies concerning objects and space.
AMADOUR: I can see that in the construction of your pieces.
TSABAR: The Inversion works that I explained a bit about in the Bass Museum show, and a couple of them also debuted just before the pandemic at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery, are embedded in walls. They attempt to unearth these hidden spaces. I think about architecture, and the use of it within gender and the place of movement is super interesting for me. This body of work consists of photographs with holes in the walls. I take them in my studio, make holes in my studio wall, and do these actions with my body alone. The act of piercing the body through the wall, I feel that’s something that, in a way, is almost radical because of how holes in walls are connected to gay culture and glory holes and stuff like that. I am thinking about the comfort men have moving their most vulnerable parts through architecture to be received by someone they do not know. I channel that same confidence and same movement and claim it.
AMADOUR: I read that Dada informs your practice as an art historical period, especially considering how male artists were more prominent than female artists.
Courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles. Photo: Allen Phillips and Maria Porada
TSABAR: My grandmother in Israel had a vast collection of art books. Then, I read intuitively; it was like a huge book on Dadaism. All the 20th Century art movements excluded women, and they’re rooted in the idea. These kinds of legacies need to be revisited. That is why I made Melody of Certain Damage, where I buy a guitar and break it alone in my studio. How the pieces scatter on the floor dictates how the work will be installed forever. I like to map out how each scrap disassembles and reinsert a new set of strings to bring it back to working order. I’m interested in the way that the chance factor comes into play. As an artist, I have to look at it and say, okay, well, this piece went 14 feet from this to that end of the studio. How do I make it become a playable instrument again?
AMADOUR: So that moment of violence is recorded by the chance factor in your work?
TSABAR: Yes. When I started making Melody of Certain Damage, the Arab Spring was full-on. Seeing the violence and then the destruction was shocking for me and very unsettling. And yeah, those works came from that place. What do you think of an existence that is still generative? How do you make an instrument out of a broken instrument after a moment of violence?
AMADOUR: I’m sure you’re familiar with the Fluxus movement and, specifically, Robin Page’s performance, Guitar Piece, where he threw the guitar off a building, which shattered. There’s also the history of musicians burning pianos and breaking guitars. That’s clever of you to subvert that chronological breaking of the instrument to create something new. And it’s also driving more sonic experimentation, which is Fluxus to me. How do you conceive this for your audience to receive?
Courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles. Photo: Elisheva Gavra
TSABAR: I usually have a couple of core musicians from New York or who have worked with me in the past, and then other local and new musicians, including FIELDED, Kristin Mueller, Sarah Strauss, Rose Blanshei, Maya Perry, and in 2019 in LA I also performed with Diana Diaz and Nicki Chen. They’re all regular collaborators. I’ve worked with some of them for almost 15 years. All of my performances are a collaboration between a community within itself and me, and the work becomes, at that point, a platform. We rehearsed together for a week or ten days, writing these compositions through exercises. We are facing the objects. We are playing together, and we’re not looking at each other, communicating without looking at each other through a sonic landscape we wrote together. That sonic landscape would have existed if the audience had come or would not have come.
AMADOUR: Fantastic. As a final question, what does it means to you to be releasing a vinyl? It’s so badass.
TSABAR: I think so too. Thank you! [laughs] It’s a hybrid catalog and vinyl object, and the Bass Museum is releasing it. It is a recording of our performance there, just under 30 minutes, that we wrote for the Bass Museum when the show closed. On the one hand, that performance was sonically complex but had complete songs. And so it was a perfect performance to start this fantasy I’ve had for quite a while. Perimeters is the album’s name, and it’s coming out in the next couple of months. It has two essays in the trifold poster you take from the vinyl. One essay is by Nat Trotman, and one is by Leilani Lynch. The vinyl has photos from work and the show and lyrics from our songs.
AMADOUR: So cool. I can’t think of something more exciting than having a vinyl in the world, and it’s such a dream.
TSABAR: Now I’m hungry for more vinyl. You may know, but vinyl is complicated these days. The process is super long. There needs to be more material. It takes time to turn around, but it’s almost like the undertaking of a show to bring it to fruition.
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Amadour is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles and New York City. Amadour investigates landscape, architectural forms, and our relationship as humans to built and natural environments. They received dual BA degrees in studio art and art history from the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture in 2018. For more information visit: www.amadour.com
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