Opening Reception for 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, and architecture as equipment that is 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, ReWire, 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.

Creator + Composer: Ash Fure

Creative Direction + Architecture: stock-a-studio (Xavi Aguirre)

Lighting Design: Barbara Samuels

Audio Engineer: Daniel Neumann

Producer: Julia Simpson

Ash Fure: ANIMAL [the listening gym] is organized by Adam Shore. It is supported, in part, by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and 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.

About the Artists

Ash Fure’s full-bodied sonic experiences work on the senses in startling ways. Called “purely visceral” and “staggeringly original” by The New Yorker, the artist’s live performances and total installations mobilize the elemental force of sound, the social muscle of listening and our animal capacity to sense. Winner of a 2025 Creative Capital Grant, she has also received two Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, an FCA Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Stuttgart Composition Prize, a Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University. Fure holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University, is Professor of Sonic Arts at Dartmouth College, and served as co-artistic director of The Industry LA from 2021 to 2024.

Xavi L. Aguirre is an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture, as well as the Founder and Director of the award-winning architectural design practice stock-a-studio. At MIT, he is the Director of DIS-ASSEMBLIES LAB, where his work focuses on design at the moment of undoing. Through built projects and research he considers our relationship to material and commodity circulations, both technically as well as culturally. Aguirre was one of the representatives for the US Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, the recipient of the 2022 Architectural League Prize, and the 2018 Muschenheim Design Fellowship, among other awards.