Live Reading for On Kawara Exhibition at Guggenheim

Photo: David Heald

One Million Years Live Reading
As part of On Kawara—Silence, a continuous live reading of the artist’s One Million Years will be presented in conjunction with the exhibition. This monumental series consists of two groups of volumes, One Million Years Past and One Million Years Future, with pages listing one million years into the past and one million years into the future. Readings will take place on the ground floor of the Guggenheim rotunda every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday from February 6 – May 3, 2015 in conjunction with On Kawara—Silence, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, located at 1071 Fifth Avenue.

Paz Tanjuaquio of TOPAZ ARTS, will be participating in the live readings of One Million Years
as part of On Kawara—Silence at the Guggenheim Museum on
Wed, February 18, 2015, 4-5pm only.

On Kawara—Silence
February 6–May 3, 2015
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
5th Ave at 89th Street
New York City

On Kawara—Silence will be the first full representation of Kawara’s output, beginning in 1964 and including every category of work, much of it produced during his travels across the globe. Through radically restricted means, On Kawara’s work engages the personal and historical consciousness of place and time.

Learn more: www.guggenheim.org/onkawara

About One Million Years:
With the work One Million Years, Kawara opposes human awareness of the day, which conditions most of his other work, to an almost unimaginable measure of past and future time. One Million Years comprises twenty-four works, each made up of ten binders. Inside each binder are two hundred pages of text, each of which lists five hundred numbers. These numbers are in fact years, one hundred thousand per volume, one million per set. The works are divided into two groups, One Million Years: Past and One Million Years: Future, each respectively subtitled: “For all those who have lived and died” and “For the last one.” The Past works were created in 1970 and 1971, and their lists end with the year prior to which they were assembled; the Future works, produced between 1980 and 1998, begin with the year after they were made.

In 1993, on the occasion of an exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, Kawara expanded One Million Years to encompass live and recorded readings, which allows the project to be both preserved and perpetuated through public recitation. Since then, the work has been the subject of live readings and recordings around the world. All readings follow the same format: readers appear in pairs, one male (who reads odd-number dates) and one female (who reads the even numbers). Each session begins where the previous one left off. Dates are read from both One Million Years: Past and One Million Years: Future and are always recited in English.

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