photo Yana Millanberg
Barbara Held is a flutist, sound artist and composer based in Barcelona. Known for her subtle exploration of the minutiae of sonic material, she creates sensitive, focused sound work that exposes the detail of the physical space of listening in equal part to a keen attention to how we listen as bodies moving through the world. She has performed a very personal body of new repertoire for flute by both Spanish and American composers, including Alvin Lucier’s “Self-Portrait” for flute and wind anemometer, scores by long-time collaborator Yasunao Tone and film and performance work with Carles Santos and poet Joan Brossa. She was flutist with New York’s Bowery Ensemble, a group with close ties to John Cage and Morton Feldman, and experienced the process of Spain’s political transition with the Grup Instrumental Català directed by Santos and Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny. With a continuing interest in the shared space between sound and image, she has collaborated with media, sound and visual artists including Richard Garet, Benton C Bainbridge, Ursula Scherrer. Seth Cluett, Eugenia Balcells, Phill Niblock, Andy Graydon, Pere Noguera, Toni Serra, Francesca Llopis and Francesc Abad.
She was the creator and producer of “Music at Metrónom”, a series of concerts of experimental music in Barcelona that gave special support to collaboration between musicians and visual artists, a project that she shared with invited co-curators such as Augusti Fernandez and Francisco Lopez. With Pilar Subira, she co-curated “Possibility of Action: the life of the score” for the Documentation Center and Archive of the Barcelona MACBA museum of contemporary art during the 2008-09 season, and “Lines of Sight”, a series of seven programs of experimental music and radio art for radio web macba.
Juan Naranjo Gallery in Barcelona commissioned a first solo exhibition (2018) of installation projects centering around “682-3133 Buffalo, Minnesota”, a 1979 film made in collaboration with composer Carles Santos. “Observatory”, Held’s generative multi-channel installation, was presented by Contour Editions at Eyebeam in New York City, and with Benton C Bainbridge’s “Lisa Joy (W)” as part of “Escuchar con los ojos. Arte sonoro en España, 1961-2016”, a group exhibition of Spanish Sound Art from the past half century at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid, and as part of “El Giro Notacional” at MUSAC, Museo de arte contemporáneo de León, Spain. “Land-ing”, the third residency of the 2018 season of Prácticas Territoriales, a series of projects with sound commissioned by Juan Matos Capote for TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, is a multi-channel sound installation by Barbara Held and Daniel Neumann that was developed exclusively from recordings that the artists made while interacting with the landscape of the island. She recently performed Christian Marklay’s “Chalkboard” graphic score at MACBA, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and contributed to “Audiosphere” curated by Francisco Lopez for the Museo Reina Sofia. With biologist and recordist Eloisa Matheu, she performed DINS PER DALT, a night journey of birds, insects and flute in the Cupola of the MNAC museum of Catalan art in parallel to DINS PER DINS, a video installation by Francesca Llopis with sound by Barbara Held, now in the permanent collection of the museum.
Performances include: LOOP Festival of Videoart, Barcelona; Museu Vostell, Malpartida de Cáceres; Soundproof Festival, London; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Solianka Gallery, Moscow; Issue Project Room, New York; The Bridge, Cologne; Experimental Intermedia, New York; Grec Festival, Barcelona; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Contour Editions at Eyebeam in New York.
Her work has been published by The Third Rail Quarterly, anòmia, FO A RM magazine and Leonardo Music Journal, and on the Lovely Music Ltd. CD, “Upper Air Observation”. She collaborates with the University of Barcelona’s Master in Sound Art program.