Ivana Dama at the Modern
On May 22 and 23, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth hands its Grand Lobby over to a Serbian sound artist who has spent her career making air do uncomfortable things.
Ivana Dama presents two performances as part of the museum’s programming around Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers, both free and open to the public. The first, on Friday, May 22 at 2 p.m., is titled Echoes of Urgencies. The second, Figures in Air, follows on Saturday, May 23 at 3 p.m. They share a preoccupation with sound as a physical force, but they arrive at it from almost opposite directions.
Echoes of Urgencies starts with Cold War infrastructure. Klaxons, horns, civil defense sirens, the whole architecture of public warning. Dama doesn’t replicate these sounds so much as rebuild them from scratch using custom “siren disks,” perforated plates that spin at high speed while pressurized air moves through the holes. The alternating interruption of airflow produces an oscillating, piercing tone that is recognizably siren-like but also something stranger, more musical, more physical. It fills a room differently than a recording does. The point is that disruption, the kind we’ve collectively agreed to treat as a signal for emergency, can also be an instrument. What happens when we hear it outside its expected context is the question the piece keeps asking.
Figures in Air works in near silence, which makes it the stranger of the two performances to watch. Dama uses a theremin-like instrument built around capacitive sensors developed with physicist Neil Gershenfeld and electrical engineer Quentin Bolsee at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. The sensors respond to proximity and subtle movement, meaning Dama can shape sound without touching anything. Small shifts in her body’s position trigger changes in frequency, pitch, and texture. She composes in space, conducting an instrument that isn’t there, or rather, that she is. Analog synthesizers build an atmospheric soundscape underneath, and live visuals generated directly from the instruments extend the whole thing into something that’s harder to categorize than a performance or an installation. It’s both.
The two performances share a stage with Johnson’s Stage, 2026, a site-specific platform installed in front of the Modern’s auditorium for the run of the exhibition. The work is, literally, a stage: powder-coated steel scratched and branded with Johnson’s signature marks, designed to be stood on, performed from, aged by use. Johnson traces the piece back to childhood memories of dancing atop Carl Andre’s floor works at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the lineage is legible. Stage is less an artwork you look at than one you activate. Dama’s performances, built around amplification and the physics of air, are a precise fit for what Johnson built.
Dama holds an MFA from Yale and a degree in Design Media Arts and Digital Humanities from UCLA, where she later served as assistant director of the ArtSci Center. She has taught as a visiting critic and professor in the Sound Art MFA program at Columbia. Her research centers on sirens, specifically on what it would mean to build a tool that signals urgency for ecological and social crisis simultaneously. The performances at the Modern aren’t separate from that research. They’re part of it.
Both performances are free. No ticket required.