Guggenheim Museum Presents T.1912 by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Inspired by the Titanic, T.1912 is a site-specific staged audience experience conceived by visual artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster for the Guggenheim rotunda. Presented in two performances on April 14, 2011, the date marks exactly 99 years-to the day-of the historic tragedy that continues to fascinate generations. T.1912 is presented in conjunction with the Guggenheim Museum exhibition The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910-1918, on view through June 1.

At the core of the installation, Gavin Bryars's large symphonic piece The Sinking of the Titanic (1969-) will be performed by The Wordless Music Orchestra. This approximately 45-minute conceptual work, composed long before the 1985 rediscovery of the Titanic, is based on reports that the band played a hymn tune in the final moments of the ship's sinking. Although it premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in 1972, Bryars has favored performances in untraditional, overly acoustic spaces such as a swimming pool in Brussels and an abandoned water tower in Bourges, France. Both the acoustics and the architecture of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim rotunda play an important part in Gonzalez-Foerster's installation, which will include subtly changing light environments.

On the evening of the performance, audience members will "board" via the museum's Peter B. Lewis Theater and will be ushered into the rotunda onto designated "decks." During the performance, the audience will be invited to move within the ramps and rotunda in correlation with the shifting of the passengers aboard the Titanic as it began to sink.

T.1912 is organized by Charles Fabius, Producer, Guggenheim Museum. This program is generously supported by The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation.

Performances are at 8:40 pm and 10:40 pm on April 14. Tickets are $30, $25 members, $10 students, and are available at guggenheim.org/t1912 or by calling the Box Office at 212 423 3587. "First-class" ticket packages, including a three-course Titanic-inspired dinner at the Wright or a pre-performance cocktail and dessert reception hosted by the Guggenheim's Young Collector's Council, are available for $350 or $200, respectively. Call 212 360 4241 for more information.

On Friday, April 15, at 2:45 pm, the Guggenheim hosts a post-performance conversation with the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Joan Young, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim Museum. The discussion follows the 2 pm screening of the seminal 1912 Titanic film In Nacht und Eis (In Night and Ice) in the New Media Theater of the Sackler Center for Arts Education, located in the lower level of the museum. The film and conversation are free with museum admission. For more information about the film, visit guggenheim.org/filmscreenings.

In her experiential, immersive work, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (b. 1965, Strasbourg, France; lives and works in Paris and Rio de Janeiro) often uses the exhibition setting to propose alternate environments, recasting the museum as a porous site that evokes other times and places. The essential building blocks of her work are cinematic; she uses color, light, sound, and motion to convey subtle narratives. Her work was recently seen in New York in Performa 09 (K.62, a collaboration with composer Ari Benjamin-Meyers), chronotopes & dioramas at Dia at the Hispanic Society (2009-10), and in theanyspacewhatever at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2008-09). Gonzalez-Foerster created the site-specific work Desert Park, 2010, for Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil. Solo exhibitions occurred in The Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2008); MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon (2008); and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris / ARC, Paris (2007). She also participated in Making Worlds at the 2009 Venice Biennale; Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007); and Documenta 11, Kassel (2002). Gonzalez-Foerster is the recipient of the 2002 Marcel Duchamp Award, Paris; the 1996-97 Mies van der Rohe Award, Krefeld; and the Villa Kujoyama, Kyoto artist residency in 1996-97.