If you attended one of Fred again..’s epic 10 shows in 10 cities in 10 weeks pop-up tour last year — which hit Glasgow, Brussels, Madrid, Lyon, Dublin, Toronto, Chicago, Mexico City, Vancouver and San Francisco — then you are probably still thinking about the tour’s eye-popping staging.
The shimmering, undulating 76-yard-long ribbon of suspended white fabric that floated above the crowd like a giant illuminated parachute was as much of a feast for the eyes as the shows were a throbbing cornucopia of sound. Now, whether you were lucky enough to score tickets for the tour or not, you can (re)experience the majesty of artist Boris Acket’s unique stage design in person.
Fred is hosting an exhibition on Thursday (Jan. 22) at East End Studios in Woodside, N.Y. titled “Boris Acket — Secret Life Exhibition,” where the artist’s “Einder Surface” installation will be set to a reworked version of Secret Life, Fred’s 2023 collaboration with legendary producer Brian Eno. According to a release, the installation will allow visitors to “inhabit and experience Acket’s work in a completely different way.”
The show will be a reinterpretation of the sheet of fabric that floated above audiences like a “transparent, breathing roof,” with the piece coming to life as a “kinetic architectural statement, inviting the audience to come together and share presence in a space within a space.”
Tickets for the show, which will run from 4-10:30 p.m. ET, are available here. A description of the one-off installation on the AXS ticketing site describes how Fred and Acket’s aim from the launch of the tour was to “reveal this work beyond the charged temporality of the concert: to offer an expanded encounter in which the artwork and music could be fully inhabited. What emerges is an extended, communal experience – seated or supine – closer to a ritual than a performance.”
The stand-alone show, presented outside the context of the concerts, will be reborn as a “durational environment, without a fixed beginning or end,” with sound and movement drifting continuously through the space, accented every half hour by a “synthetic and generative storm reverberat[ing] through the building, newly recomposed for this exhibition by Boris Acket, briefly destabilizing the calm before receding again… ‘Einder’ stands among Boris Acket’s most developed and personal works. The hope is that this sense of closeness — between people, materials, and sound — can be felt throughout the experience, however briefly or however long one chooses to remain.”
