Sam Durant’s two-channel video ‘Trope’ (2020) accompany The Common Guild’s presentation of the artist’s ‘Iconoclasm’ drawings across outdoor sites in the city from 17 May – 11 July 2021.

Both the drawings and the video depict historical and contemporary acts of destruction enacted upon statues and monuments in the public realm. Many of the ‘Iconoclasm’ drawings were taken from original newspaper photo-reportage and television footage. Likewise, ‘Trope’ is a compilation of recent and archival news clips collected and collaged together from anonymous internet sources.

The video portrays the simultaneous toppling and resurrection of public statuary in different locations around the world – including the spontaneous deposition of the statue of Edward Colston by Bristol residents in 2020 – ‘Trope’ emphasising the cyclical and recursive nature of iconoclastic acts and the compulsion to destroy symbols of the past.

Sam Durant (b. 1961, Seattle, Washington USA) lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Los Angeles, California, USA.

Durant is an interdisciplinary artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues that emphasise democratic ideals, racial equality and social justice. His works make connections with present and ongoing social and cultural issues, often taking up forgotten events from the past.

Durant’s interest in monuments and memorials began with ‘Proposal for Monument’ at Altamont Raceway (1999), continued notably with ‘Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions’ (2005) that recontextualizes memorials to victims of the conquest of North America, and more recently with ‘Proposal for Public Fountain’ (2015), a marble work depicting an anarchist statue being blasted by a police water cannon. He has recently presented major public art projects, ‘Labyrinth’ (2015) in Philadelphia which addressed mass incarceration and ‘The Meeting House’ (2016) in Concord, MA that took up the subject of race in colonial and contemporary New England.

Durant’s latest public sculpture, ‘Untitled (drone)’, (2021) – a monumental fiberglass sculpture in the shape of an abstracted drone ¬– is the second commission for the High Line Plinth, New York City, and is on view from May 2021 until 2022. It raises the issues of drone warfare and surveillance in American society.

His work has been included in numerous international exhibitions including Documenta 13, the Yokohama Triennial, the Venice, Sydney, Busan, Liverpool, Panama, and Whitney Biennials. His work can be found in many public collections including Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium, Tate Modern, London, England.

Durant teaches art at the California Institute of the Arts.

Project Details

Sam Durant, ‘Trope’ (2020)
Two channel video with sound
12 minutes, 35 seconds
Video editor Ana Branea, Sound design Laurențiu Coțac.
Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.

‘Trope’ was presented as part of Glasgow International 2021’s Digital Programme.

“Listening is not a passive experience. It doesn't just happen to us. Listening is an action. When I listen, I choose to direct my attention to an other. So, when I listen, the ‘I’ becomes a ‘we’. And I don't only mean listening with my ears, but my entire body receiving, sensing the other. I mean listening as a way of thinking, as an attitude and a way of being.”

‘Acoustics of Resistance’ brings together a range of sound recordings made by Mikhail Karikis made at different times and in varied locations over recent years. These are woven together with compositional fragments and a text written and spoken by the artist that reflects on the climate crisis and proposing listening as a form of solidarity, care and activism.

Karikis’ monologue, recorded in Lisbon, described a youth protest against climate change that the artist joined in 2019. Swept up by the crowd and enfolded in rushing waves of noise, Karikis tunes in to the sonic activity of socio-political change – the chants, shouts, drums and whistles – and the transformative power of communal voice.

Protest chants merge with choral recordings performed by primary school children and the Liverpool Socialist Singers whose collective whispers, hisses and gasps for breath fluctuate between a sense of crowded human presence, existential urgency and the sonics of a tumultuous and foreboding weather system.

Mikhail Karikis is a Greek-British artist, working and exhibiting internationally. His work in sound, moving image and performance develops site-specifically through collaborations mostly with communities located outside the context of contemporary art and, in recent years, with children, teenagers, young adults and people with disabilities. He employs listening, communal sound-making and video to question the power dynamics between the visible and the unheard and as forms of care and activism. His projects highlight alternative modes of human action and solidarity, while nurturing critical attention, dignity and tenderness.

Karikis has exhibited in leading museums and biennials worldwide. Solo exhibitions include ‘Ferocious Love’, Tate Liverpool (2020); ‘For Many Voices’, MIMA, Middlesbrough; ‘Children of Unquiet’, Tate St Ives; ‘I Hear You’, De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea; MAM Screen, MORI Art Museum, Tokyo (all 2019-20); ‘Children of Unquiet’, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino (2019); ‘No Ordinary Protest’, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018-19); ‘The Chalk Factory’, Aarhus 2017 European Capital of Culture (2017). He has shown at 54th Venice Biennale, (2011), IT; Manifesta 9, Genk (2012); 19th Sydney Biennale, (2014); 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016) and MediaCity Seoul (2015). He is professor at MIMA School of Art & Design.

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2021 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.

Credits

Voice by Mikhail Karikis, Lisbon, April 2021.
Dawn chorus fields recording, London, April 2020.
Liverpool Socialist Singers, Liverpool, March 2020. Extract of a recording appearing in "Ferocious Love”, 2020, by M. Karikis, commissioned by Tate Liverpool and Birmingham City University.
Climate protest, Luxembourg City, March 2019
Year 3, Mayflower Primary School, London, May 2018, extract of a recording appearing in “No Ordinary Protest”, 2018, by M. Karikis commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery.

References

LaBelle, B., Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance, (Goldsmiths Press: London) 2018.
Safran Foer, J., We Are The Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, (Hamish Hamilton: UK, USA, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa), 2019.
Bernard Lynch, Easter email message, 2021.

Rosa Barba’s artistic practice typically engages film as both a narrative and a sculptural medium. In ‘Faring with Faraway’ she visualises with sound, using cinematic language, and various elements like a series of images. Together, they produce a hybrid, layered experience in which notions of time are both stretched and compressed.

‘Faring with Faraway’ includes fragments of archival interviews with certain figures whose lives have captivated Barba, selected from the spoken word recordings and oral history archives kept by the British Library. Voices, predominantly of women, recount life stories, with memories of childhood, family and working life. The speakers include the socialist educator Hilda Brown; Katharine Ramsay, Duchess of Atholl, the first Scottish woman elected to the House of Commons; and Mary Chamberlain, an early proponent of oral studies and women’s history. All of the speakers were activists and campaigners for the welfare of women, and the rights of children and refugees. Within their personal stories are certain hints towards the pervasive context of British Imperialism in the first half of the 20th century, testament to a socio-political heritage that continues to reverberate in the present.

Voices intermingling with environmental sounds, musical abstracts, birdsong and animals. A field recording of a cargo train captured by the artist as it passes through the town of Marfa, Texas provides a rhythmic leitmotif, carrying the sequence along. Here the women’s voices function more like instruments in dialogue, overlapping, blending, harmonising and chattering together, allowing the listener to transcend the archival material itself and appreciate its tonal nature as part of a larger musical composition.

Rosa Barba engages within the medium of film through a sculptural approach. In her works, Barba creates installations and site-specific interventions to analyse the ways film articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role for the artist as Barba examines the industry of cinema and its staging vis-à-vis gesture, genre, information and documents. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative. They often focus on natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment and explore the relationship of historical records, personal anecdotes, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty.

She has had solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions worldwide (including Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku (2020); CCA, Kitakyushu (2019); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Malmö Konsthall (all 2017); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2016); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA (2015); MAXXI, Rome(2014); Tate Modern, London (2010); and has participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennials, including the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2016) and the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale (2009 & 2015). Her work is part of important collections and has been widely published. In 2020, Barba was awarded the Calder Prize by The Calder Foundation.

Further Info

Part of ‘In the open’ series II

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2021 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.
Design by Maeve Redmond.

Credits

‘Faring with Faraway’ contains extracts of recordings held by the British Library Sound Archive.

References

‘Life story interview with the late educationist, Hilda Brown (1909-1996)’, reference C468/011 (1991).
‘Life story interview with Mary Chamberlain, oral historian,’ reference C1149/27 (2012-14).
‘Life story interview with the late Kathleen Halpin (1903-1999) who was an active member of the London and National Society for Women's Service (now the Fawcett Society) until her death,’ reference C468/002 (1991).
‘Life story interview with the late British Labour politician, Norah Phillips, Baroness Phillips (1910-1992)’, reference C468/014 (1992).
Patrick Sellar interviewed by Mark Peter Wright, ‘The wildlife recordist discusses his personal history and the formation of organisations and archives he helped to establish,’ reference C1672/2 (2013).

All five interviews © British Library.
[Patrick Sellar’s interview is part of the Wildlife Sounds collection]

Items held in the collections of the British Library Sound Archive

Katharine Ramsay, Duchess of Atholl, ‘The New Outlook for Women’ (1929). Original issue number: Columbia 5340.
Constance Ripman, ‘Breakfast Time’ (1939). Speakers: Sally Latimer, Henry Oscar, Pamela Ripman. Issued as part of the Linguaphone 'Let's Talk English' series, published by Dents, October 1946. Original issue number: Linguaphone English 2E1.

With thanks to Mary Stewart, Oral History/National Life Stories British Library, Chloe Reith and Stephan Mathieu.

Artist and musician Lawrence Lek composes expansive atmospheric soundtracks to accompany the virtual reality worlds of his computer-generated film-works. In these hybrid, simulated universes, music plays a central role in world-building, creating a powerful sense of place. The sonic expression in Lek’s fictional realities fill spatial experience, driving the narrative through texture and emotional tone.

Like Lek’s film soundtracks, the ‘Rift EP’s instrumental synth melodies play on the musical language of video games, cinema and science fiction scores, evoking other worlds, different times and imagined places. They also embody a progressive, journeying quality. Presented as one continuous track, the ‘Rift EP’ has four distinct sections – 'Portal', 'League', 'Cyber' and 'Fantasy' – each with slightly different sonic characteristics and parallels to the developing levels of gameplay.

The experience of listening to the ‘Rift EP’ is akin to that of navigating the impossible architectures and vast, para-fictional CGI cityscapes of Lek’s films. As a soundtrack to walking outdoors, ‘Rift’ offers a transportive lens turning our surroundings into a film set, augmenting our perception of everyday reality and expanding the imagination beyond the here and now. A transcendent otherworldly space emerges through the alternating patterns and momentum of the music which holds within it a future-oriented flow.

Lawrence Lek is a London-based artist, filmmaker, and musician working in the fields of virtual reality and simulation. Drawing from a background in architecture and electronic music, he creates fictional versions of real places that speculate on alternate geopolitical movements and future technological conflicts. This cinematic universe features characters caught between human and machine worlds: digital nomads, AI satellites, and online superstars, all searching for autonomy under alien conditions of existence.

His works include the virtual world 'Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours)’ (2015), the dystopian Brexit simulator ‘Europa, Mon Amour’ (2016), the video essay 'Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD)' (2016), the AI-coming of-age story 'Geomancer’ (2017), the video game '2065' (2018), and the VR simulation 'Nøtel' (2019, in collaboration with Kode9). His CGI feature film 'AIDOL' (2019) was presented at the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and transmediale 2020, Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Ghostwriter', CCA Prague (2019); 'Farsight Freeport', HeK, Basel (2019); Nøtel, Urbane Künste Ruhr, Essen (2019); 'AIDOL', Sadie Coles HQ, London (2019); and '2065', K11, Hong Kong (2018). Lek composes soundtracks and conducts audio-visual mixes of his films, often incorporating live playthroughs of his open-world video games. Soundtrack releases include 'AIDOL OST' (Hyperdub, 2020) and 'Temple OST' (The Vinyl Factory, 2020).

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2021 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Credits

Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.
Design by Maeve Redmond.

Tarik Kiswanson’s composition ‘Surging’ occupies a weightless space in which a disorienting collage of sounds hangs suspended in a formless silence, shifting in and out of focus. Sounds crash and objects collide, breaking together; glass shatters, perhaps a window; and sirens ring out, immediately recognisable. No sooner do they arise than the sounds are abruptly interrupted before their auditory arc is complete; swallowed up and refracted elsewhere. This aural debris – a combination of recorded, collected and repurposed sound – appears to have its own agency, trajectory and dynamic rhythm.

Occasionally a child’s voice speaks through the silence, posing questions that refuse resolution and articulating phrases from an unknown narrative that guides the listener deeper still into an uncertain, deconstructed world. The voice is Kiswanson’s preadolescent collaborator Vadim, a Romanian-French boy living in Paris. The figure of the preadolescent child is significant to Kiswanson, symbolising a moment in a child’s growth and development when they first become aware of their own sense of self, who they are in relation to others, and their place in society.

Vadim’s words, extracts from the artist’s writing, are spoken directly to the ear of the listener, as if tuning in to an inner voice. As he speaks, the hybridity of a voice that holds multiple linguistic and cultural associations becomes clear, his words layered with different contexts, conditions and geographies.

Through syncopated repetition, ‘Surging’ gradually builds a disordered looping pattern that refuses to settle. The work exists in a buoyant, levitating state of tension and instability where things connect, collide, disintegrate and reform endlessly; a reoriented space of existence and possibility.

Tarik Kiswanson’s work encompasses sculpture, writing, performance, drawing, sound and video works. His fundamental question is ontological: it is inscribed in philosophical research into Being as being. Notions of rootlessness, regeneration, and renewal are recurring themes in his oeuvre. Born in Halmstad, Sweden in 1986 where his family exiled from Palestine, his artistic practice evinces an engagement with the poetics of métissage: a means of writing and surviving between multiple conditions and contexts. His various bodies of work can be understood as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes like refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, hybridity, and polyphony through their own distinct language.

Kiswanson has most recently presented his work at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019), Ural Biennial, Ekaterinburg (2019), Performa Biennial, New York (2019) Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2018), Fondation Ricard, Paris (2018) and the Gwangju Biennial (2018). His retrospective exhibition ‘Mirrorbody’ is currently at Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain accompanied by a forthcoming monograph published by Distanz. His upcoming solo exhibitions include MMAG Foundation, Amman (2021), M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp and Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (both 2022).

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2021 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Credits

Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.

Opening with silence, or more accurately with the absence of action, Cally Spooner’s ‘DEAD TIME: Narrator’s Script’ (2019-2021) introduces the listener to an altered sense of time in which no major event nor narrative development takes place. The script is one element drawn from Spooner’s 63-page performance score ‘DEAD TIME’ (2018) which she has been incrementally translating through live performance and installation since composing it in Autumn 2018.

The ‘DEAD TIME’ score is set in “a surveillance-capitalist crime scene” where an absurdist ecosystem of living and non-living characters co-exist in a resistant, pervading present-tense atmosphere; waiting, rehearsing, repeating, yet never quite converging.

The Narrator is both a single male voice and solo piano. Ruminating on faltering immune systems, unstable financial markets, corporate feminism and #MeToo, the Narrator’s composite of pirated language and attenuated silences is met with a regimented bleep-beat and the timed swell of piano repeating the theme tune from a Netflix TV show.

Through this loosely improvisational structure, the reading, like the ‘DEAD TIME’ score as a whole, seeks to hold a space that remains resistant to ‘chrononormativity’ – the imperial, masculinist standardisation of time that orders labour, performance, and digital technologies into a progressive future-orientated linearity.

This particular reading was recorded with a live audience at Camden Arts Centre, London, on the 11th March 2020. In a convergence of events, this took place on the day social distancing was introduced in the UK, setting in motion a collective state of pause.

In her sound edit for The Common Guild, Spooner pivots the listener’s focus towards a very uncomfortable captive audience on the cusp of dramatic societal shift and a year of intermittent captivity. The soundtrack of the room and the audible tension of bodies gathered together brings a palpable clarity to the reading; both staging and activating a state of dead time, testing this as a potential to reset neoliberal temporalities of productivity and liveliness.

Listeners should experience ‘ DEAD TIME’: Narrator’s Script’ whilst walking, working or engaging in other activity. We recommend listening with headphones.

Cally Spooner (1983) lives and works in Turin, Italy. Rooted firmly in her training in philosophy, her practice is generated through writing, unfolds as performance, then lands as film, sound, sculpture, drawings or scores. Her performances incorporate duration and rehearsal as acts of resistance to corporate-digital and performative climates in which it is hard to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead.

Spooner has a forthcoming solo show at the Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (2021) and commissions at the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis and MOCA, Cleveland (both 2021). Her solo shows include 'DEAD TIME', The Art Institute of Chicago (2019); 'SWEAT SHAME ETC.', Swiss Institute New York (2018); 'Everything Might Spill', Castello Di Rivoli, Rivoli (2018); 'DRAG DRAG SOLO', Contemporary Art Centre Geneva (2018); 'Soundtrack For A Troubled Time', Whitechapel Art Gallery (2017); 'On False Tears and Outsourcing', New Museum, New York (2016). ‘On False Tears’, her monograph, was published by Hatje Cantz and Edizione Madre in 2020. Her book 'Scripts' (2016) is published by Slimvolume, and her novel 'Collapsing in Parts' (2012) is published by Mousse Publishing.

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2021 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Credits

Sound Mix by Tom Sedgwick.
Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.

The original recording at Camden Art Centre was organised and commissioned by Lynton Talbot as part of Spooner’s project at Parrhesiades, London.
The piano is played by Neil Luck.
The voice is Jesper List Thomsen.

Recorded in the winter of 2020, ‘Love Letters to E9’ continues Ayo Akingbade’s poetic meditation on urbanism and the ways in which the built environment shapes and influences individual character. “The geography and architecture of Hackney are reflections of my sense of identity,” says Akingbade, whose work looks back on community histories and personal legacies deeply connected to the metropolis, specifically inner London.

‘Love Letters to E9’ accompanies childhood friends - Akingbade and Lané Frederick - sitting at Well Street Common. They reminisce on the defining years of their early childhood, recalling the positivity of school days; feelings of freedom, happiness and optimism for what the future might hold. Their conversation addresses their youthful dreams and desires, recalling early 2000s pop music, friendships and minor local landmarks the playground, a primary school pond that has since disappeared – small reveries of collective significance that they struggle to piece together through fragments of shared memory.

Their talk is occasionally offset by the everyday sounds of present-day Hackney; a fuzzy contemporary soundtrack that underscores the difference and distance between their mental landscape and the urban space that now surrounds them. “I don’t want to talk about gentrification” says Akingbade, but it is the relentless transformation and constant erasure enacted by this practice that resonates just beneath the surface of their exchange, articulated through a sense of (dis)locatedness and uncertainty for the future, both for themselves and the local community.

‘Love Letters to E9’ contemplates coming of age in a city that is constantly regenerating and remaking itself, reflecting on the passing of time with a quiet, undramatic poignancy.

Ayo Akingbade is an artist, director and writer from London. She works predominantly with moving image, addressing notions of urbanism, power and stance.

She has exhibited and screened widely, including presentations at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2020); ‘This is England’, Somerset House Studios, London (2019); ‘Building Space’, South London Gallery (2019); ‘In formation’, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, (2018); and ‘Imagination Is Power: Be Realistic, Ask the Impossible’, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, (2018); as well as Birkbeck University (2020), and Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2020) amongst others.

Akingbade graduated with a BA in Film Practice from London College of Communication and is due to graduate with a postgraduate diploma in Fine Art from Royal Academy Schools in 2021.

Forthcoming projects include ‘A Glittering City’, Whitechapel Gallery (2021) and ‘No News Today’, Coventry Biennial (2021).

Further Info

‘In the open’ – series II

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2021 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Credits

Original music by Oliver Palfreyman.
Sound recording by Kim Bradfield.
Sound Mix by Oliver Palfreyman.
Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.
Design by Maeve Redmond.

With thanks to Lané Frederick, Oliver Palfreyman, and Kim Bradfield.

Well Street Common
South Hackney
London E9 5DY

'In the open' - series II continues our programme of artist audio commissions. Where the first series featured artists based here in Glasgow, this time the programme extends to international locations, with all six artists based elsewhere in the UK and Europe.

This second series presents new works by Ayo Akingbade (London), Rosa Barba (Berlin), Mikhail Karikis (Lisbon), Tarik Kiswanson (Paris), Lawrence Lek (London), and Cally Spooner (Turin), who each provide a distinctive perspective on their particular situation. As before, the audio works have been designed to accompany daily walks and time spent outdoors, while we continue to live under the restrictions brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.

‘In the open’ offers a way of connecting with others at a time when we remain separated due to the global impact of the pandemic; a separation perhaps felt all the more keenly in light of Britain’s departure from the European Union. The project was first conceived during the UK national lockdown of March 2020, and now, when our movement to other places continues to be restricted, these new audio works allow us to travel across borders, linking us to others and to divergent networks of history, culture, knowledge and belonging.

The new audio works, which will be released between January – April 2021, take the form of field recordings, found and manipulated sound, scripted performance, dialogue, and musical composition. The artists offer different listening experiences: transportive acoustic soundscapes, relational spaces, intimate exchanges, shared moments of pause, and, importantly, the opportunity to step away from our screens. Each work acts as a portal, granting entry to sonic territories and environments beyond our own; offering glimpses into social, geographic and psychological worlds temporarily out of reach.

Whilst we are still unable to share physical projects and join together with audiences, ‘In the open’ presents an opportunity for immediacy and closeness with artworks unmediated by the screen – an experience that is currently unavailable as so many museums and galleries are again closed. The project allows us to continue our commitment to supporting artists and developing new works for audiences.

Designed for listening on headphones while outdoors, the works can nonetheless be listened to anywhere. Each audio work will be released on The Common Guild website, Bandcamp, and podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Play.

Artist Biographies

Ayo Akingbade is an artist, director and writer from London. She works predominantly with moving image, addressing notions of urbanism, power and stance.

She has exhibited and screened widely, including presentations at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2020); ‘This is England’, Somerset House Studios, London (2019); ‘Building Space’, South London Gallery (2019); ‘In formation’, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, (2018); and ‘Imagination Is Power: Be Realistic, Ask the Impossible’, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, (2018); as well as Birkbeck University (2020), and Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2020) amongst others.

Akingbade graduated with a BA in Film Practice from London College of Communication and is due to graduate with a postgraduate diploma in Fine Art from Royal Academy Schools in 2021.

Forthcoming projects include ‘A Glittering City’, Whitechapel Gallery (2021) and ‘No News Today’, Coventry Biennial (2021).

Rosa Barba engages within the medium of film through a sculptural approach. In her works, Barba creates installations and site-specific interventions to analyse the ways film articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role for the artist as Barba examines the industry of cinema and its staging vis-à-vis gesture, genre, information and documents. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative. They often focus on natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment and explore the relationship of historical records, personal anecdotes, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty.

She has had solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions worldwide (including Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku (2020); CCA, Kitakyushu (2019); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Malmö Konsthall (all 2017); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2016); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA (2015); MAXXI, Rome(2014); Tate Modern, London (2010); and has participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennials, including the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2016) and the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale (2009 & 2015). Her work is part of important collections and has been widely published. In 2020, Barba was awarded the Calder Prize by The Calder Foundation.

Mikhail Karikis is a Greek-British artist, working and exhibiting internationally. His work in sound, moving image and performance develops site-specifically through collaborations mostly with communities located outside the context of contemporary art and, in recent years, with children, teenagers, young adults and people with disabilities. He employs listening, communal sound-making and video to question the power dynamics between the visible and the unheard and as forms of care and activism. His projects highlight alternative modes of human action and solidarity, while nurturing critical attention, dignity and tenderness.

Karikis has exhibited in leading museums and biennials worldwide. Solo exhibitions include ‘Ferocious Love’, Tate Liverpool (2020); ‘For Many Voices’, MIMA, Middlesbrough; ‘Children of Unquiet’, Tate St Ives; ‘I Hear You’, De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea; MAM Screen, MORI Art Museum, Tokyo (all 2019-20); ‘Children of Unquiet’, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino (2019); ‘No Ordinary Protest’, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018-19); ‘The Chalk Factory’, Aarhus 2017 European Capital of Culture (2017). He has shown at 54th Venice Biennale, (2011), IT; Manifesta 9, Genk (2012); 19th Sydney Biennale, (2014); 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016) and MediaCity Seoul (2015). He is professor at MIMA School of Art & Design.

Tarik Kiswanson’s work encompasses sculpture, writing, performance, drawing, sound and video works. His fundamental question is ontological: it is inscribed in philosophical research into Being as being. Notions of rootlessness, regeneration, and renewal are recurring themes in his oeuvre. Born in Halmstad, Sweden in 1986 where his family exiled from Palestine, his artistic practice evinces an engagement with the poetics of métissage: a means of writing and surviving between multiple conditions and contexts. His various bodies of work can be understood as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes like refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, hybridity, and polyphony through their own distinct language.

Kiswanson has most recently presented his work at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019), Ural Biennial, Ekaterinburg (2019), Performa Biennial, New York (2019) Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2018), Fondation Ricard, Paris (2018) and the Gwangju Biennial (2018). His retrospective exhibition ‘Mirrorbody’ is currently at Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain accompanied by a forthcoming monograph published by Distanz. His upcoming solo exhibitions include Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm and MMAG Foundation, Amman (both 2021).

Lawrence Lek is a London-based artist, filmmaker, and musician working in the fields of virtual reality and simulation. Drawing from a background in architecture and electronic music, he creates fictional versions of real places that speculate on alternate geopolitical movements and future technological conflicts. This cinematic universe features characters caught between human and machine worlds: digital nomads, AI satellites, and online superstars, all searching for autonomy under alien conditions of existence.

His works include the virtual world 'Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours)’ (2015), the dystopian Brexit simulator ‘Europa, Mon Amour’ (2016), the video essay 'Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD)' (2016), the AI-coming of-age story 'Geomancer’ (2017), the video game '2065' (2018), and the VR simulation 'Nøtel' (2019, in collaboration with Kode9). His CGI feature film 'AIDOL' (2019) was presented at the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and transmediale 2020, Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Ghostwriter', CCA Prague (2019); 'Farsight Freeport', HeK, Basel (2019); Nøtel, Urbane Künste Ruhr, Essen (2019); 'AIDOL', Sadie Coles HQ, London (2019); and '2065', K11, Hong Kong (2018). Lek composes soundtracks and conducts audio-visual mixes of his films, often incorporating live playthroughs of his open-world video games. Soundtrack releases include 'AIDOL OST' (Hyperdub, 2020) and 'Temple OST' (The Vinyl Factory, 2020).

Cally Spooner (1983) lives and works in Turin, Italy. Rooted firmly in her training in philosophy, her practice is generated through writing, unfolds as performance, then lands as film, sound, sculpture, drawings or scores. Her performances incorporate duration and rehearsal as acts of resistance to corporate-digital and performative climates in which it is hard to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead.

Spooner has a forthcoming solo show at the Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (2021) and commissions at the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis and MOCA, Cleveland (both 2021). Her solo shows include 'DEAD TIME', The Art Institute of Chicago (2019); 'SWEAT SHAME ETC.', Swiss Institute New York (2018); 'Everything Might Spill', Castello Di Rivoli, Rivoli (2018); 'DRAG DRAG SOLO', Contemporary Art Centre Geneva (2018); 'Soundtrack For A Troubled Time', Whitechapel Art Gallery (2017); 'On False Tears and Outsourcing', New Museum, New York (2016). ‘On False Tears’, her monograph, was published by Hatje Cantz and Edizione Madre in 2020. Her book 'Scripts' (2016) is published by Slimvolume, and her novel 'Collapsing in Parts' (2012) is published by Mousse Publishing.

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2021 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Read the Commentary by Daisy Lafarge –

‘Méduse’ (2020) explores geological time, myth and geographical space with reference to the Fossil Grove, an ancient petrified forest preserved in Glasgow’s Victoria Park.

Weaving together experimental sound and spoken journey, ‘Méduse’ witnesses these trees’ slow evolution from the swampy tropical forests of the Carboniferous period to their present geographical position and material form. Through sibilant sounds and hissing clay, the imperceptible activity and micromovements of dissolution and decay is made apparent. ‘Méduse’ observes natural cycles of reformation and reanimation across millions of years as the trees collapse, hollow out and are compacted into the earth to remain petrified underground as the land slowly drifts north, away from the equator, taking in a world history as they go.

Eleven fossilised stumps of extinct lycopod trees were discovered during the expansion of Victoria Park in 1887, preserved in the place where they grew 325 million years ago; forms orphaned from their own time to become concurrent with ours. Carboniferous trees are better known in the present for their use-value as fossil fuels, but the material shapeshifting performed by the trees of Fossil Grove has allowed them to gain the status of protected objects to be maintained in a covered enclosure within the park.

The dormant, apparently lifeless state of the Fossil Grove tree stumps is reconsidered through the articulation of deep geological timescales as the petrified trees are reanimated as slow actors in the present time – a reminder that the past exists concurrently with the present and that stasis can be a source of agency and protection.

Gault narrates an associative and visceral journey that roams in multiple directions delving into facets of time and connecting places and ideas like root systems underground. From the digestive systems of mammals, to a petrified wood gas station in Colorado, Gault’s rhythmical musings construct phantom shapes from what is less visible, creating a new world myth of petrification.

'Méduse' features field recordings of the environment around Fossil Grove, amongst an abundance of aural images, watery noises and warped vocals as well as the harmonious sound of 'ringing rocks’; stones that resonate at different frequencies when struck, thought to have be used as prehistoric instruments.

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2020 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Credits

Sound Editing by Richy Carey.
Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.

With thanks to Victoria Park and Fossil Grove, Richy Carey, Hayley Gault and Joe Morton.

Fossil Grove and Victoria Park
51 Victoria Park Drive South
Glasgow G14 9QR

Birthed in sadness, a teardrop falls from a feeling eye into The River Kelvin, descending to its littered riverbed. 

Hitting the bottom, the teardrop is transformed into fresh water. It lingers atop a murky soil for a time, then follows a current up through the Kelvin’s aquatic soup to its surface. There, warmed by sun and summer heat, our teardrop evaporates. It ascends in a hot thermal push up through the air and joins a cumulus cloud.

Margaret Salmon’s ‘Clouded’ (2020) is a listener's meditation on watery feeling, air flow, horizons, moisture and the sky; a cyclic journey that begins at the Kelvin Bridge in Glasgow’s West End and follows the river to the Clyde Estuary and skywards.

Using field recordings, spoken word, musical sounds and based upon scientific and aural intuitions Margaret Salmon presents a listener's companion to cumulus clouds, tears, rivers and more. In this imaginative rumination on interdependency and restorative release she traces the path of water from our terrestrial bodies into the sky, then back to earth. 

Clouds migrate, moving freely above the earth. Border-free and nationless, they are anti-commodities that redeem and destroy, without recourse to human narratives or preoccupations. Clouds are badass. Learning about clouds can be enlightening, but the eye and the mind can appreciate their nebulous configurations without any prior instruction. This audio guide is intended to encourage and support the wonder of cloud gazing – one of the simplest and most enduring forms of human observation – and to share thoughts about water and transformation in nature.

Salmon's audio meditation can be listened to outdoors, indoors, up in the air, underground.

Further Info

Documents

Transcript: Margaret Salmon – 'Clouded'

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2020 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Credits

Written, performed and edited by Margaret Salmon.

Sound Recordist: Pete Smith
Additional Sound: Margaret Salmon

Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering

With thanks to:
Katrina Brown, Chloe Reith, Ulysses, Eglantine and Philomena Salmon Wiand, The River Kelvin and Glaswegian skies.

The River Kelvin at the Kelvin Walkway
Off Kelvin Drive
Glasgow G20 8QG

Duncan Marquiss’ ‘Contact Call’ (2020) is a series of improvised instrumentals played on electric guitar; the result of the artist’s close study of birdcalls heard during spring and summer 2020 when Scotland was experiencing lockdown.  

Birds’ vocalisations can transmit over long distances and cut through loud urban environments, but the lack of activity and traffic noise over this period allowed their interactions to be picked out more readily by the human ear. Contact calls, as distinct from birdsong, are short phrases that birds share back and forth as a way of maintaining contact whilst foraging for food. These avian dialogues, where a near call is answered by another bird at a distance, create patterns of call-and-response which are emulated here by guitar sounds and rhythms.

Marquiss’ recordings mimic specific bird calls with the guitar, imitating phrases, high pitches or percussive sounds, and offering pauses, as birds do, that leave room for the listener’s immediate surroundings to accompany the sounds played. Some sections are clearly bird-like whilst other parts are more random musical meanders that emerged from playing around. ‘Contact Call’ is an edited selection from these experimental recordings.

Many bird calls are impossible to simulate, but this process was a starting point for improvisation and for finding a new approach to a familiar musical instrument. As a filmmaker, Marquiss often creates soundtracks with the guitar for his own moving image work and in a similar way ‘Contact Call’ can be used as a soundtrack for a walk, generating a particular atmosphere in your head. 

The studied birdcalls were heard during frequent walks around Queen’s Park, Linn Park and Pollok Park in Glasgow. This piece reflects on our acoustic ecologies, and the need to share bandwidth with other species.

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2020 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Credits

Music written, performed and recorded by Duncan Marquiss.

Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.

With thanks to:
Kimberley O'Neill, Mick Marquiss and Anne Marquiss.

Queen’s Park
Langside Road
Glasgow G42 9QL

Linn Park
Glasgow G44 5TA

Pollok Park
2060 Pollokshaws Road
Bellahouston, Glasgow G43 1AT

Ashanti Harris’ ‘History Haunts the Body’ (2020) is a continuation of the artist’s research into the historical relationship between Guyana, where the artist was born, and Scotland, the artist’s home, taking in the ignored and forgotten legacies of a historical, female diaspora.

Guyana was subject to British colonial rule for over two centuries, during which time the country’s sugar plantations in Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice were worked by enslaved African people and governed predominantly by wealthy Scots. This colonial control led to movement between the two countries; a history that remains largely unexplored, particularly the presence of Afro-Caribbean women across Scotland.

‘History Haunts the Body’ tells the stories of four Guyanese women who, along with their children, were part of Scottish society in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their complex histories are recounted by a single female voice, accompanied by outdoor rural and coastal soundscapes recorded in various locations where the women were known to have lived or visited. A soundscape recorded at Cromarty Harbour in the Black Isle provides a transportive undercurrent to the audio narration from beginning to end. A low mechanical hum – the sound of a ship approaching and passing by the harbour – grows in intensity throughout the duration of the work and acts as a kind of chronos, folding together the present with the past.

The work is intended as a process of physically embodying and revivifying these histories as they literally enter into the body through the act of listening. A second voice guides the listener through a series of physical awareness and body-centring exercises as a way of holding, internalising and meditating on these women’s extraordinary lived experiences.

This second voice acts as a calming presence, offering relaxation techniques and reminding listeners to "breathe", contrasting the often difficult and challenging facts of these women’s lives. The voice could also be heard as speaking directly to the women in the stories; providing notes of care, support and resilience as they face the violence of colonial rule and the punitive realities of Imperial society in Scotland and the Caribbean at this time.

Harris will present a live monologue and sound performance ‘Virgo’(2020) via Instagram Live on Thursday 3 September 2020. ‘Virgo’ draws deeper into the artist's research of the life of Elizabeth ‘Eliza’ Junor (1804–61), one of the four Guyanese women whose history in colonial Guyana and Scotland is introduced through this audio work.

Further Info

Documents

Transcript: Ashanti Harris – 'History Haunts the Body'

Additional Links

Performance / Ashanti Harris - ‘Virgo’

‘In the open’

The Common Guild Instagram

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2020 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Credits

Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.

With thanks to Adebusola Ramsay, David Alston and Jen Martin.

Luke Fowler’s ‘The Pitches’ (2020) is the first of two sound portraits by the artist that explore two contrasting acoustic environments in Glasgow’s urban geography. The sites chosen – North Kelvin Meadow / The Children’s Wood and the city’s commercial centre – document in different ways how lockdown has altered the sonic and psychological experience of the city’s inhabitants.

Recorded at different times of day and night using both handheld and unattended microphones, the resulting edited field recordings are composed of months of regular recording trips that witness subtle environmental changes, varied presences and the evolving rhythms of these spaces.

North Kelvin Meadows is a former gravel football pitch adjacent to the house where Fowler grew up. After the pitch was officially closed, the site lay dormant until it was reclaimed by the local community, who saved the space from development. It remains one of the few ‘wild’, community-managed areas in the city. Fowler’s mother – a retired sociologist whose voice is heard reading and in conversation – continues to live in the family home. The work moves between the private space of her garden and the public site of the meadows.

Travelling across this sonic terrain, ‘The Pitches’ notes the particularities of the location which sits in a natural basin below busy road, surrounding tenements and a former school. This unusual aural environment – which combines large open fields with smaller wooded spaces – creates a complex auditory landscape where spatial information is imprinted on the everyday sounds that occur here.

‘The Pitches’ could be described as a work of ‘audio verité’, capturing transient patterns of exchange, fragments of conversation, bodies moving through space, shifts in weather as well as cat fights, fox cries, birdsong and the drone of encircling helicopters are all witnessed by Fowler’s microphones. The recordings offer multiple ways of listening to the space; at times engaging with the collective effervescence of the site, at others drawing us towards subtle acoustic phenomena and vibrations that we would ordinarily “screen out”. Although specifically local, ‘The Pitches’ contributes to the sense of a broader global narrative playing out beyond this particular community as it adjusts towards the new social, physical and intangible realities we now face.

Fowler’s second piece will be released later in the series.

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2020 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Credits

Recorded with Mid-Side stereo mics; stereo omni mics which capture frequencies down to 1hz (originally intended for military purposes); ORTF mics, Stereo Shotgun Mics; small portable recorders with inbuilt mics and contact microphones.

Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.

With thanks to:
Bridget Fowler, Corin & Liath Sworn, Andrea Fisher, Mark Vernon, Peter and Ted Sherry, Margaret Salmon, Steven from Belgium, Everyone at North Kelvin Meadows.
Analogue processing of floodlight gong by John Chantler.

North Kelvin Meadow/
The Children’s Wood
76 Kelbourne Street
Glasgow G20 8PR

‘In the open’ is a series of audio works that have been conceived during lockdown conditions and devised for listening to during our daily walks and time outdoors. Prompted by the restrictions necessitated by Covid-19, and the way these continue to affect our public and social lives, ‘In the open’ has been created as a way of connecting, at a time when we are separated.

The project comprises seven new works by Glasgow-based artists Luke Fowler, Lauren Gault, Ashanti Harris, Sulaïman Majali, Duncan Marquiss, and Margaret Salmon, each working from different points of reference and experience to explore geographies, histories and globally linked emotions, with Glasgow’s parks, green spaces, and other walking routes of the city in mind.

The works take various forms – experimental sound, field recordings, readings, performance and conversation – with each reflecting different rhythms and altered soundscapes in the city. They offer forms of intimacy, emotional trajectories, diaristic journeys and touch without touching; suggest a redefinition of our relationship to nature and the city as a strategy for living; propose new understandings of time and location; or else provide a record of the unseen forces and invisible labour that supports society.

Designed for headphones, the works are imagined as being listened to outdoors but can of course be listened to anywhere and will exist beyond this particular place and present moment in time.

‘In the open’ allows us to continue our commitment to supporting artists and developing new works. Each audio work has been released between July and September 2020 on The Common Guild website and Bandcamp and is now available as a Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher.

Artist Biographies

Scottish artist, filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler has developed a practice that is, at the same time, singular and collaborative, poetic and political, structural and documentary, archival and deeply human. With an emphasis on communities of people, outward thinkers and the history of the left, his 16mm films tell the stories of alternative movements in Britain, from psychiatry to photography to music to education. Whilst some of his early films dealt with music and musicians as subjects, in later works sound itself becomes a key concern. (Maria Palacios Cruz)

Lauren Gault is an artist born in Belfast and based in Glasgow and Magheramourne, Northern Ireland. She graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, and works in sculpture, installation and writing.

Selected solo exhibitions include: ‘C I T H R A’, Gasworks, London (2020); ‘forgets in knots’, Kantine, Brussels, ‘drye eyes’, Grand Union, Birmingham, ‘O-n’, curated by David Dale Gallery at The Workbench, Milan (all 2019); ‘present cOmpany’, CCA Derry-Londonderry; ‘sequins’, (with Sarah Rose), Glasgow International, (all 2018); ‘lumpers and splitters’, Prairie Underground, Seattle (2017); he was there when I first smelled the smell, and now he is the smell, (with Zoe Claire Miller) Rinomina, Paris, (2016); ‘lipstick-NASA’, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2015); ‘fugue states’ (with Allison Gibbs), CCA, Glasgow (2015). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Baltic39 (2017); Frutta, Rome, (2016); and SALTS, Basel (2014). Upcoming projects include ‘Some Triangular Thoughts’, a publication with SLOWGLASS, 2020 and a solo exhibition at The Tetley, Leeds in 2021.

Ashanti Harris is a multi-disciplinary visual artist and researcher working with dance, film, performance and sculpture. With a focus on re-contextualising historical narratives, her work dissects the movement of people, ideas and things, together with the wider social implications of these movements. She is co-director of Project X, a creative education programme platforming dance and performance from the African and Caribbean diaspora; and works collaboratively as part of the arts collective Glasgow Open Dance School (G.O.D.S), facilitating experimental movement workshops and research groups.

Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘The Skeleton of a Name’, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, and‘Second Site’, Civic Room, Glasgow (both 2019). Group shows and performances include: ‘Pre-Ramble’, David Dale, Glasgow (2020); ‘Walking Through the Shadows Eyes Open’, SUBSOLO Laboratório de Arte, Sao Paolo; ‘BLIP!’ Annuale Edinburgh; ‘As of Yet’, Many Studios, Glasgow; ‘Just Start Here’, The Anatomy Rooms, Aberdeen; and ‘Festival of the Not’, Circa Projects, Newcastle (all 2019).

Sulaïman Majali is a Glasgow-based artist born in London. Recent exhibitions include: ‘WHAT’S AHEAD, WHAT’S KNOWN’, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2020); ‘saracen go home’ (solo exhibition), Collective Gallery Edinburgh (2020); ‘Pixelated Peripheries // مساحات مبكسلة’, ACC, Haifa, Palestine (2019); ‘something vague and irrational’, Celine, Glasgow, (2019); and ‘Mene Mene Tekel Parsin’ (curated by Jesse Darling), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2017). Screenings and events include the International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany (2020); EARTH HOLD, Qalandiya International Biennial, Serpentine Galleries, London (2018); and the 8th Cairo Video Festival, Egypt (2017).

Majali was shortlisted for the Margaret Tait Award 2020/21 and is currently participating in a two-year artist/researcher-in-residence programme at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh College of Art. Majali will present the solo exhibition, ‘false dawn’ at Studio Pavilion as part of the postponed Glasgow International in 2021.

Duncan Marquiss is an artist based in Glasgow who works with video, drawing and music. His work explores analogies, patterns and connections between the natural and the artificial, considering the fuzzy edges of these categories. He is currently developing a documentary film looking at animal behaviour and AI.

Marquiss graduated from the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2005, and undertook the LUX Associate Artist Programme in 2009. He received the Margaret Tait Award in 2015. Recent exhibitions and screenings include; ‘Artists In The Cinema’, Projections, Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (2020); ‘Stalking The Image’, GoMA, Glasgow (2019); ‘Texture Map’ (solo exhibition) Platform, Easterhouse (2019); ‘We Would Be Lost Without You’, Experimenta, London International Film Festival (2018); and ‘Copying Errors’ (solo exhibition), Dundee Contemporary Arts (2016).

Margaret Salmon is a Glasgow-based artist, born in New York. Concerned with a shifting constellation of relations, such as those between camera and subject, human and animal, or autobiography and ethnography, Salmon’s films often examine the gendered, emotive dynamics of social interactions and representational forms.

Selected solo exhibitions have been held at institutions including Dundee Contemporary Arts (2018/19), Tramway (2018) Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2015); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, USA (2011); Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2007); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2007) and Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2006). Her work has been featured in film festivals and major international survey exhibitions, including the Berlin Biennale (2010), Venice Biennale (2007) and London Film Festival (2018, 2016, 2014). Salmon won the inaugural MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2006, was shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2018 and the 2019 Margaret Tait Award. A new 35mm film and photographic works will be featured in Glasgow International 2021.

Further Info

Documents

Transcript: Ashanti Harris – 'History Haunts the Body'
Transcript: Lauren Gault – 'Méduse'
Transcript: Margaret Salmon – 'Clouded'

Read the review by Chris Sharratt in Frieze
Read the review by Adam Benmakhlouf in The Skinny
Read the review by Neil Cooper in The Drouth

Additional Links

Luke Fowler – 'The Pitches' | 31'50"
Lauren Gault – ‘Méduse’| 23'32"
Duncan Marquiss – 'Contact Call' | 30'45"
Margaret Salmon – 'Clouded' | 13'08"
Ashanti Harris – 'History Haunts the Body' | 23’ 36”
Sulaïman Majali – 'strange winds' | 18'18"
Luke Fowler – ‘A walk through a different city’ | 35'56"

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2020 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Read the Commentary by Brandon LaBelle –

The breath, always, is a portal
a gasp, a death – a life.

‘strange winds’ (2020) is part of a constellation of works that centre on a recurrent ghostly figure described by Majali as an ‘impossible protagonist’, who is both individual and multitude, and moves through the landscapes of a diasporic imaginary, colliding with reflections in the colonial.

In this sound work, we’ve climbed a hill to see a sun rise. The spectre inhabits a glitching, distorted phone recording, crawling up through the throat of the device; a cry, a groan, a tired scream, a gasp, an exhale. In a translation of A Thousand and One Nights (1), Scheherazade diverges to warn us of an approaching dawn, as a spreading zodiacal light sings at 110hz. From here, it’s all a widening expanse; an owl, in a field recording of a Spring sunrise (2), looks out at the depths and heights of mourning. We are reminded that surviving the king takes place in the realm of the breath – and that survival is a weapon under structures of disposability. Where r we. Synthetic swift song flocks overhead – we’re sitting, the sky still dark pretty much, and a stretched hum, like skin, erupts, strings out questions at its borders.

something dense bends at the horizon, towards liberating futures, and in them we’re growing more alive

“this is nothing, scheherazade answered,
to that which i would tell u tomorrow night,
if i were still alive and the king wished to preserve me.”

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2020 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

‘strange winds’ can be listened to seated, outdoors, maybe 17 minutes before a sunrise.

References

1. The end of the fourth night from "The Tale of the Wazir of King Yunan and Rayyan the Doctor", read by @Arabian Whispers ASMR, Arabian Nights ASMR 🌌 Whisper Reading part 6, Jan 25th 2019.

2. Field recording of a sunrise taken on Sunday 26th April 2020 from a viewpoint marked by a flagless flagpole in Queens Park, Glasgow, Scotland, designed to view the full expanse of the city in a given direction.

Credits

Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.

With thanks to:
Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach (Vocals); the sunrise of Sunday 26th April 2020; 'Arabian Whispers ASMR'; Oscar Prentice-Middleton; Karim Kattan; 皚桐; Scheherazade.

Luke Fowler’s second acoustic work for ‘In the open’ is a sound portrait of Glasgow’s urban core, emptied out of human presence during the months of lockdown earlier this year. Edited from over 500 hours of audio recordings, ‘A walk through a different city’ traces a sonic journey that begins at the top of Sauchiehall Street, winds through alleyways and lanes, past hotels and empty car parks before taking in Buchanan Street – the heart of Glasgow’s commercial shopping district – heading south through a deserted Central Station, and concluding under the Kingston Bridge, by the River Clyde.

‘A walk through a different city’ frames the city’s acoustic environment at the height of the pandemic, defamiliarized through the absence of crowds. This radically altered ambience allows us to tune into a broader and more nuanced soundscape to the one we are accustomed to. With the shoppers, buskers and traffic gone, Fowler’s microphones instead amplify impressions from a transformed acoustic environment; extractor fans, electricity boxes and triggered alarms systems polarise our sonic experience. A vibrating undercurrent to the ordinary ambience of the city, the drones, rumbles and fluctuating tones at times take on a meditative, almost harmonic quality, whilst at others feel abrasive and disquieting.

The social sounds we do hear punctuate our perceptual field – snatches of overheard conversation, the sound of floors being mopped and bins being jet-washed, construction work being hastily erected and tannoy announcements being made. These encounters and micro-events map our social behaviour and trace new patterns emerging during these highly sensitive and anxious times.

‘A walk through a different city’ is a companion piece to ‘The Pitches’; a sound portrait of North Kelvin Meadow / The Children’s Wood. Both works document the ways in which the pandemic has altered the sonic and psychological experience of the city and its inhabitants.

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2020 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Credits

Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.

With thanks to Alex Kapranos, Eric La Casa, and Mark Vernon.