Ami Dang in Concert

Overview

The Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) presents composer, vocalist and sitarist Ami Dang in concert.

Dang is part of a lineage of artists, from Philip Glass and Terry Riley to the sound artists now working in museums, for whom a gallery is the right room for music. Her 2017 work Ruins, made with filmmaker Jonna McKone and cellist Alexa Richardson for the Walters Art Museum’s Art.Sound.Now series, placed film, sitar and six channels of electronic sound among the museum’s Greek sculpture, letting the music spill through adjoining galleries. She has recorded in the Moog Sound Lab, performed at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, and in 2023 reworked her song “A Muted Crime” for an orchestral ensemble at Baltimore’s Current Space. Her album covers and website are made with visual artist Phoebe Frances.

Dang picked up the sitar at 12 and studied North Indian classical voice and sitar in New Delhi and Maryland before earning a degree in music technology and composition at Oberlin Conservatory. She treats the sitar as a compositional instrument the way a painter treats a material: run through effects, looped, set against synthesizers and her own voice, and built into long-form structures that move between stillness and tension. The Guardian called her album Parted Plains “self-assured,” and The Washington Post described her sitar music as “expansive.” She has collaborated with Animal Collective, William Cashion of Future Islands and Thor Harris, and has toured with Beach House, black midi and Grimes. Her latest album, The Living World’s Demands, was co-released by Leaving Records and Phantom Limb.

“We opened CAMi with a gallery dedicated to sound art because we think sound belongs in a contemporary art museum the same way painting does,” said Shauta Marsh, CAMi Director and Chief Curator. “Ami is a composer who has made work for museum galleries, and that’s why she’s here. When she plays, the sitar does what a sculpture does. It holds the room.”