Borders of (im)materiality

_{Co-curated the section: Listening through the noise in collaboration

with Adrienn

Lestyán

& Magda Hamdy}
_{Category: Poster Design, Exhibition Design and Curation}
_{Dates: 25th January - 7th February 2019
Location:

Łódź
, Poland
Venue: Art Inkubator in Fabryka Sztuki}

“Borders of (im)materiality” exhibition program is a result of a 3-month collective curatorial research by 9 members of Media Arts Cultures EMJMD program at the University of Lodz. With the participation of artists from Poland, the exhibition features generative works, VR experience, noise, and experimental electronic performances, photography and video, glitch art, queering sound technologies, live performances, installations, discussions, and a pop-up reading & listening corner.

Listening through the noise

‘The ear does not listen—the brain does’. Listening still remains an aloof or mysterious activity that allows for the abstract, and the (im)imaterial to emerge from waveforms of perception.

Pauline Oliveros defined listening as a breathing space before mindful action: “Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action.” As curators, our aspiration was to establish a space where listening becomes a fully embodied performance in which the listeners are free to attend to sounds and therefore to attend to the world with ears wide open for all to be heard, pausing for a breath when needed and listening into those spaces carefully. Sound as an auditory zone that one enters, a space where magic can happen, where expressions and needs are attended to and privileges are challenged.

Levelled by a generation centered around Poland’s arts/clubs spaces and the city of Łódź, “listening through the noise” explores aesthetics of noise, glitch, ambience, and experimental electronic music. Examining these influencing notions of sound in a mix of raw states, seen and experienced through the lens of a richly textured DIY culture, it highlights sound practices that organically emerge obscurely in cities as resistance and as imagination from the mangled and broken times that have shaped its history. The sound imprints that are followed are taken up by observation, personal interaction and careful listening in an attempt to first discover and then subsequently spotlight individuals, communities and collectives in their pursuit of sound.

Artists: Adam Mańkowski / Maciej Ożóg / Smutne Kobiety / Zosia Hołubowska / Sounds Queer?

Curators: Adrienn Lestyán / Alifiyah Imani / Magda Hamdy

Adam Mańkowski (2018)

Live performance

The live performance presented in the exhibition space by Adam Mańkowski is a combination of modular sound synthesis and sound effects.

LLS is the name of the Polish ambient/experimental musician Adam Mankowski. He’s a composer and sound artist, who loves the textures and fusion of classical/electro-acoustic music with the electronic digital ones. Project is active since 2006. Music from the sign LLS is a mixture of drones, experimental electronics, ambient, sometimes noise and field recordings.

Smutne Kobiety (2018)

Installation and live performance
Duo featuring Izia Bobrowska and Joanna Szumacher

The duet was created in 2014 in Lodz. The work of Smutne Kobiety, meaning “Sad Women” consists of distortion, noise, glitch, fields recordings and grows out of the Weltschmerz concept, digital nostalgia and feminism. Technology often used contrary to its purpose serves to protect a vulnerable body. The field of activity is the art history, contemporary culture and everyday life focused on keeping alive.

“We are sad and we are not afraid to use it.”

Maciej Ożóg | (re)activity (2018)

Live performance

(re)activity explores a distinctive waveform of space shaped by the propagation of electromagnetic as well as mechanical waves specific for a certain venue. By means of various sensors (electromagnetic, photoelectric and piezoelectric) vibrations that fill the space are detected and fed into the modular synthesiser. They are used in twofold way: as a raw sound material and as signals that influence the behaviour of the modular system. Various sound parameters are also used to control the image generated in real time creating a fluctuating, morphing, unstable audio-visual portrait of the space.

Maciej Ożóg is a theorist of culture, sound artist, curator and dj. Since the early nineties he’s been involved in experimental music scene in Poland. He works in the field of sound art, live multimedia performance, and interactive installations. Founder of many bands (Spear, Ben Zen, Nonstate i.a.). His solo works critically explore limial territory between activity of the body and invisible infrastructure of the hybrid space. Co-organizer of the L’tronica Festival for Electronic Music and Art.

Zosia Hołubowska (2018)

Audio essay

Zosia Hołubowska: Spell: Path | audio essay, 8 min, 2018

I once asked my grandmother to sing me something she remembers from childhood. The melody and words she hummed inspired me to create an audio essay about wandering. The destinies of both of my grandmothers were marked with moving to the other side of their worlds. I am a migrant myself. Every day I am reflecting upon my traveled path. Where and how I arrived. On the other hand, I am trying to be aware of my privileges. I want to create the space for something to happen with my voice. A space to think about the personal trajectory. How did you find yourself here? Was it hard? Do you have a passport, a residence permit, a job for old time's sake, savings, apartment inherited from parents? The song that my grandma sang me was not a traditional song, just a scout tune. I am trying to imagine my past, that left no archives behind. And I remind myself about a chicory plant and a legend that this flower is an enchanted girl, that was too weary of the road but wanted to travel.

Zosia Hołubowska is a queer sound artist, musician, and a music activist. They are a Ph.D. Fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and currently on a study and research visit at Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in Den Haag (NL). Hołubowska is interested in queer as a methodology in artistic research based on sound, and feminist and post-colonial approaches to ethnomusicology. Hołubowska is also a founder and curator of Sounds Queer? - a flying queer synthesizer laboratory - that organizes electronic music workshops in Vienna (AT) and Brno (CZ).

Zosia Hołubowska | Sounds Queer? (2017/2018)

Video documentation
Queer synthesizer laboratory in collaboration with: Aja Ireland, Nicole Sabella, Verena Schwab, Miña Tarilonte Rodríguez and Karolina Karnacewicz

Sounds Queer? was founded in 2014 by Zosia Hołubowska as a flying queer synthesizer laboratory. Zosia is a non-binary sound artist, researcher and music activist. Since then, it offered workshops on electronic music and queer sound in Poland, Austria, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Germany, and Australia.

Can music animate a queer safer space? How would such a space feel?

Video, 17 min, 2017-2018
Footage: Autarchy, Editing: Zosia Hołubowska