Opening Reception for ANIMAL [a listening gym]

Join Pioneer Works in a public opening celebration of Ash Fure: ANIMAL [a listening gym]

ANIMAL [a listening gym] transforms the gallery into a sensory-intensive environment that renders the body a conduit for sound. Conceived by artist and composer Ash Fure in collaboration with architect Xavi L. Aguirre (stock-a-studio), the installation riffs on the spatial and behavioral logics of gyms, reimagining athletic equipment as a series of sonic sculptures activated through friction, pressure, and movement.

Over the past decade, Fure has developed a practice that foregrounds the physical force of sound, creating visceral installation-performances that challenge conventional notions of music. In ANIMAL [a listening gym], amplified frequencies and spatialized audio circulate through steel-clad structures that invite viewers to press, lean, lift, loiter, and observe. Shifting fields of light move in sync with the sound—from total saturation to near darkness, from seismic bass to the edge of silence—exercising perception to its limits. These moves activate a body-borne form of listening, one that situates sound not as a passive backdrop, but as a dynamic experience that unfolds through the body itself.

At the core of the project is an interest in forms of collective experience organized through shared sensation rather than speech. “The gym and the club are two of the only cultural containers I know that invite a kind of private/public, alone/together intensity,” Fure notes. “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.”

First commissioned by the Yale Schwarzman Center in 2023, ANIMAL [a listening gym] is part of an ongoing, shifting project that includes performances, an album recording, and future site-specific installations, including an upcoming expansion presented by The Industry in Los Angeles in late 2026. To adapt across these contexts, Aguirre designs the built environment as a change-ready system, a scalable kit-of-parts construction intended for movement, disassembly, and reconfiguration. "I treated the architecture itself as a form of portable equipment in service of the body, ready to adapt to new contexts without losing material value or social intensity," he writes. Across its many forms, ANIMAL asks how sound can ignite the body’s capacity to sense, endure, and connect.

Ash Fure: ANIMAL [the listening gym] is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with support from the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and by Creative Capital Foundation and the Neukom Institute for Computational Sciences.

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.