Opening Reception for ANIMAL [the listening gym]

Join Pioneer Works for a public opening celebration of Ash Fure w/ stock-a-studio: ANIMAL [the listening gym]

Pioneer Works is pleased to present ANIMAL [the listening gym], a physical listening environment that renders the body a conduit for sound. Conceived by artist and composer Ash Fure in collaboration with architect Xavi Aguirre (stock-a-studio), the exhibition features a custom-built system of contact-driven architectural machines designed to confront listeners with the physical force of sound. Riffing off the logics of circuit workouts, these stations amp the senses, corral the focus, and activate a heightened relational field that functions entirely outside language.

Over the past decade, Fure has forged a reputation for creating visceral installation-performances that defy musical convention, premiering works at major international venues (Lincoln Center, MOCA Geffen, Berghain) while garnering significant honors (Rome Prize, Guggenheim, Creative Capital, FCA Grant-for-Artists, DAAD, Pulitzer Finalist). As her first major public installation, ANIMAL [the listening gym] marks a significant foray into the art world.

"My challenge was to translate the sensory intensity and spatial dynamism I can bring through live performance to an enter-anytime installation format," Fure notes. To do this, she turned toward other models of body-forward co-presence. “The gym and the club are two of the only cultural containers I know that invite a kind of private/public, alone/together embodied intensity. No pressure to perform the self through words; just the body and its edges, the energy and its limits, each on their own adrenaline ride."

ANIMAL [the listening gym] manifests as a cyclical, durational form that compels a kind of generative loitering: a sustained encounter with sound and time outside the performer/listener divide. Visitors navigate the installation at their own pace, physically engaging the listening gym machines to drive sound straight into their bodies. Around them unfolds an orchestrated atmosphere of spatial sound and shifting light—from seismic waves of bass to the edge of silence, from total saturation to near darkness—exercising sensory capacities at their limits.

Built to move, scale, and shift, the architecture draws on non-static construction techniques. Aguirre adds, "The gym machines are designed not as fixed objects, but as change-ready systems—structures that anticipate their own movement, disassembly, and reinvention. Each machine is both infrastructure and invitation—robust yet itinerant, durable yet open—ready to roll up and occupy new spaces without losing material value or social intensity.”

ANIMAL [the listening gym] will be paired with a series of live performances and activations that build on its themes. The exhibition is an evolution of a prior installation-performance presented and commissioned by Yale's Schwarzman Center in 2023. Conceived as modular and scalable, since then, it has taken multiple forms. As a solo performance work titled ANIMAL [for body and sound], it has toured through festivals around the world (Big Ears, Long Play, Unsound, IRCAM, CTM, MUTEK, and many others) and was also released as a studio album on Smalltown Supersound. In late 2026, it will further expand into ANIMAL [the underground], a site-specific sonic takeover of a cavernous concrete basement and emptied swimming pool in LA, presented by The Industry.

Learn more about our exhibitions here.

Exhibitions at Pioneer Works are made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.