Alabamian artist & musician based in arseille, FR
ART STATEMENT
Phenomena of assemblage & improvisation define my process. My work begins with the fragmentary, an avatar of the individual & an instrument of allusion. The fragment suggests unseen wholes, intricate orders, & vast arcs of movement or form. The spontaneous assemblage of fragments is a dialogue between a subjectivity & something beyond it.
I collect fragments and scatter them arbitrarily. Scattering is the extension & expansion of a node into a network. Noticing resonance between the nodes of this network, I manipulate their interactions; adding, subtracting, adjusting. This process only occurs in the present. Editing is improvisation. Materials and movements surf contingency.
Boundaries leak, overlap, dissolve.Interleaving & nesting beget recursion, superimposition, and concrescence. There are always assemblages within assemblages, assemblages of assemblages.
The network of assembled fragments becomes a processual nexus. From the interactions of entangled, heterogenous parts, a new whole emerges with surprising properties that cannot be understood by examining it’s individual components. Oscillations between the whole and the parts charge the work with looping tension and unpredictable torsion. Under these strange forces, the assemblage acts upon itself. As information is created by this process, the assemblage’s initial fragmented nature, as well as its degrees of freedom and constraints, evolve into a more integrated development, a generative process.
I see my works as integrative hierarchies wherein the whole exerts influence upon its constituent parts while being simultaneously influenced by those parts. Improvising with assemblage, I play into this generative nature and invoke a strange collaborator, animating both work and process with uncanny life.
twjr, Marseille 2023
MUSIC BIO
Turner Williams Jr. plays the shahi baaja, an electrified chordophone from the zither family that uses typewriter keys to alter the pitches of its strings. Invented in Japan, evolved in India, and sold secondhand in Alabama, this instrument is a transcultural mutation, merging Asian, European, and American roots with modern mechanical interventions.
Turner shreds and tangles these roots with a raw, embodied practice that entwines the physical and narrative through improvisation. His work refracts hybridity through an unhinged and intuitive practice, haptic and cybernetic as it is hectic and syncretic.
He has performed at European festivals like Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, Kraak Festival in Antwerp, Improtech in Uzeste, Tokyo & Paris, and regularly collaborates with the European ERC REACH project at Ircam.He has made concerts and residencies in the four national centers for creative music in France (IRCAM - CENTRE POMPIDOU, GMEM, GRAME, ATHÉNOR CNCM).
© TURNER WILLIAMS JR. 2026