Performed in Theatre Korzo, The Hague, at the Sedje Hémon: Hidden Agreements program. Sedje Hémon (1923-2011, born Sedje Frank) was a Dutch visual artist and composer, who, throughout her long career, developed a distinguished and individual artistic voice both with her paintings and compositions. She had an intimate connection to music and drawing from a young age, and was dedicated to playing the violin professionally. After the war, she transitioned to painting and composing, largely because the physical injuries she sustained in concentration camps during the war made it impossible for her to continue playing violin. Hémon’s urgency to express her ideas though art became evident from her very first exhibition in 1955, when art critics were struck by the music “hidden” within her paintings. Hémon’s theory of the “integration of the arts” aimed to prove the common origin of all arts. To put this theory in practice, during the 1950s and 60s she developed a method to generate musical scores directly from her paintings. Various musical parameters (such as duration, pitch and timbre) would be extracted based on the points along the lines and curves of the paintings. This approach resulted in a body of approximately 300 paintings, some of which were later turned into musical scores for internationally acclaimed ensembles. Throughout her long career, Sedje Hémon worked with a variety of artistic media and produced a large body of paintings, compositions, lino-cuts, cut-outs, and sculptures. In 2017, her work was exhibited in documenta 14 in both Kassel and Athens.

• published: 22 May 2018
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