As part of the Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025 programme, Magda Stawarska reimagines her moving image installation Music and Silence (2023) for this unique presentation with a live performance by pianist Zeynep Özsuca.

In this new screening of Music and Silence, Stawarska has selected two out of four videos of her multi-channel video installation, focusing on a musician practicing in a music academy. One cornerstone of the film is the architecture of the richly decorated Academy of Music, Łódź, originally constructed in 1904 as a private residence, while the other is the cellist, Alexandra Rosol, practicing Leoš Janáček’s Pohadka (1910). Playing alone, the cellist performs recalling the missing piano part from memory. 

For this special presentation, Özsuca responds with a live piano performance. In some moments, Özsuca plays the piano part of Pohadka, in time with the cellist on screen. While in others, Özsuca diverges from the recorded music, bringing in new sounds and layers of temporality, creating a textured soundscape of diegetic and non-diegetic music. 

Documentation by Ray O’Daly