Ethan Braun and Lina Grumm on maintenance, care and polyphony

We speak to the duo on the thinking behind their exhibition, Intimation of Endless Space Given in a Small Window of Time (approximately 10 minutes), currently on view at Artspace Aotearoa through 12 July.

Ethan Braun and Lina Grumm, Wall, *same old fucked 2, 3:14; same old fucked 1, 3:12*, 2025, calendarised stereo-channel sound, printed vinyl, length as above, 270 x 483.5 cm. Courtesy of the artists

The exhibition centres on the idea of translation—to move something from one placento another. This unfolds in the space literally in the way that sonic compositions have been, and continue to be, transformed into visual elements; but also emerges as a practice and way to explore the expanses between knowledge. How did you approach the process of translation, when the material you were working with was so open to interpretation?

When we began developing the exhibition, we thought about how a musical score ranges from describing sound to suggesting and instructing actions that produce sound. Each of the six scores in the exhibition plays with this range. Across the show, fifteen pieces of music are grouped by affect, quality, and musical tendency, each group tethered to one of six different scores. Each score has its own speaker system to diffuse the pieces tethered to them. Structuring the diffusion of sound is a digital “brain” programmed and designed by Simon Lear, that controls the various lighting and sound elements of the piece. Perhaps it’s helpful to begin score-by-score:

The wall score connects to two versions of the same piece. It plays with different notational systems: the Guidonian hand (an ancient European musical mnemonic tool using the hand), Curwen hand symbols (a modern counterpart), and conventional music notation—all layered into a comic-strip format replete with emojis, text, and waves. The projection, placed beside it, eschews musical notation entirely. Its animated photography of Hollywood clouds is subtitled to narrate the sound of its three pieces.

The Reading Room frames a single A0 page version of a score for twenty two voices written in standard notation, sounded here by sine waves. The floor score places standard expressive markings, tempi, chords, and durations of its drone-based sound in a 2.7m-wide circle. The mirror is more abstract: a real mirror hangs on a wallpaper staircase next to an elderly grand piano. It reflects both the space and the actions of maintenance performers who, with a felt pen, both notate on and erase from it musical fragments. The hand/book collages images of hands offering affective, gestual, interpretive readings of its two pieces.

Our approach to translation emphasized how material could live across multiple systems—sometimes instructing, sometimes interpreting, and sometimes dreaming.

You invoke the word 'maintenance' a lot to describe the interaction between the work shown and the living elements of the space—in particular, it is the title of the live performance series that will unfold throughout the show's duration. How does maintenance differ from 'care', a term that has perhaps more currency in contemporary art contexts?

To our minds maintenance refers to systems that underpin functionality, the labor that sustains operations, and the ongoing effort to keep things moving, forms of care yes but with an overtone of the machinic. The exhibition’s sound, light, and projection sequences are governed by a computer—a custom-built digital “brain” that holds and executes the show’s structure. Liveness offers what the brain cannot: responsiveness, intuition, risk.

Maintenance—from the French le main (the hand) and tenir (to hold)—carries the feel of hands-on labor: cleaning, repairing, tweaking, managing inefficiency. It's physical and systemic. To perform alongside the brain is to maintain liveness—expanding and opening out the sense of presence that utter automation would flatten. Throughout the show, the recurring image of hands (in the wall score, in the book scores) signals this tactile insistence. We maintain the exhibition with our own sounding bodies in real time.

In the accompanying essay, it is put forward that a chorus—the lungs of the many—can both support and destabilise a single voice. Can you speak more about the impetus for wanting to create a collective experience within the exhibition?

Since beginning work on the show we’ve emphasized polyphony and counterpoint. Polyphony being many voices and counterpoint the means of handling those voices as they rub up against or lean into each other–their dissonances, consonances, melodies.

The six scores and their fifteen musical realizations give us an odd number of moving parts. They weave into and wave over one another. They might clash, hold, soar, or stay silently still. Sometimes a voice in a contrapuntal texture speaks out, becoming the point, if you will, to which the other voices counter. With maintenance, a performer subsumes into the dissonance of a moment as readily as they surface above it. When someone enters the gallery, their presence and particularly their reading and listening become part of that ecosystem.

At peril of triteness: music needs a listener, a performer, a composer, an instrument, a space, a context. It gathers people in—sometimes actively, sometimes just by being heard. That’s the kind of collective space we’re working with. The chorus isn’t a metaphor; it’s what’s happening.

Artspace Aotearoa has its own question for each of the artists and visitors who come through the gallery in 2025: Is language large enough? What is an artwork that has made language feel 'larger' to you—either something you've made or encountered?

Ethan began using the word “maintenance” to describe live music making in the exhibition, considering the words connotations outside of “performance” or “concert” with their rituals of spectatorship, clapping, watching, and being entertained. The point was to draw attention to liveness in a different form. Lina brought up the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles who, in 1969, penned a manifesto of ‘Maintenance Art’ (published on Artforum in 1971). Apropos your earlier question, in fact, Ukeles’s text proposed a project she titled “CARE.” Her project was to draw attention to the issues of maintenance work made invisible by a culture that frowns upon and holds its nose at the dirty work of plumbing, waste management, fixing a lightbulb, or changing a diaper. She writes:

“I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother (random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving etc. Also (up to now separately) I “do” art. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as art.”