Esther Sibiude
The Big Crunch
June 9th - July 30th, 2023
Esther Sibiude is a visual artist, writer and harpist working in New York. She studied Fine Arts at the Universität der Künste Berlin from 2009- 2014. In complement to her visual art practice she writes radio dramas and curates compilations of poetry and music for the radio. Her work has been broadcasted on Montez Press Radio, Wave Farm Radio, Sub Text Radio and Threads Radio. Recent performances that she wrote, directed and played harp in include “Esra” a live staged adaptation of a radio drama, performed in the panorama of New York City at the Queens Museum and “Nightshade” co-written with Colleen Billing and played at Montez Press Radio’s performance space in Chinatown, New York. Esther Sibiude’s music ensemble includes a violist, cellist, vocalist, an organist who plays the synthesizer, and herself on the harp.
Esther’s solo show at Entrance, “The Big Crunch”, will present fourteen large-scale drawings in colored pencil and watercolor made between the years 2017 and 2023. One week after the opening, Sibiude will stage her newest radio operetta, “The Song of Dirt Stammers our Tongue”, at the Kitchen, one of the oldest institution for performance art in NYC. This new work will premiere on the nights of June 14 and June 16 as part of Montez Press Radio’s 12-month Residency with The Kitchen.
The drawings in “The Big Crunch” share a cosmological border with language, in where writing ends, these drawings begin, presenting us with undulating biomorphic landscapes that recall psycho-grams and reverie. The titles of these works exist not as definitions of an image but rather as short stories onto themselves, and are found again in the librettos Sibiude writes for her operettas and radio-dramas. In-step with Sibiude’s interdisciplinary practice, the drawings at Entrance will be shown alongside a selection of props from her latest performance at The Kitchen.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a calendar of space whose nature was to distribute good and bad luck. On day one, the calendar imposed vertiginous symmetries. An empty sound sprinkled into pink air.
2022
Colored pencil on paper
25.5” x 31.5”
He wired the shadows and played them up and down like scales.
2022-2023
Colored pencil and watercolor on paper
25.5” x 31.5”
The atmosphere slowly pressed the life out of him.
2020
Colored pencil and watercolor on paper
26.25” x 32.25”
Nature, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, knew that happiness was an ancient dream. Seconds filled up like a bath and glided along the shore. Inflated with a mixture of blue earth and thick blood, they moistened into land.
2022
Colored pencil on paper
26.5” x 38.5”
Her mind slipped down the stairs.
2023
Colored pencil on paper
26.5” x 38.5”
Flowers travel by night.
2022
Colored pencil on paper
25.5” x 31.5”
The hill had only one side and it fell over.
2018-2022
Colored pencil on paper
25.5” x 31.5”
The polluted dream froze her eyelashes and turned the butterfly-shaped gland in her throat into a pebble.
2020
Colored pencil on paper
25.5” x 32.5”
Melodies were stacked like a pile of nodes, a sort of scaffolding.
2021-2022
Colored pencil and watercolor on paper
26.5” x 38.5”
We were to be found in the eternal return of the same. Under the rays of a dark sun that shone like a womb and spread its colors throughout the universe. While narratives and history proliferated their shadows disintegrated.
2022
Colored pencil and watercolor on paper
26.5” x 38.5”
One morning of all the mornings in the world, existence and its problematic aspect rose. Somewhere in this chaotic universe, in a relatively rare occurrence, molecular randomness generated organic proteins.
2018
Colored pencil on paper
25.5” x 31.5”
The armor of the chamber cracked, the thickness of the blood melted, life evacuated and lost itself in sensual experience. All was riot and confusion. Violence and pleasure played a dangerous game.
2022
Colored pencil on paper
25.5” x 31.5”
The universe is a semi circle moving towards the void.
2020
Colored pencil on paper
26.5” x 32”
The world naps in dust.
2021
Colored pencil on paper
25.5” x 31.5”
For a PDF or details please email louis@entrance.nyc