After All, Everything Is Different In The End

Opening: September 25, 2009 at 18.00
Open: Sept 26 - Oct 18, 2009, Thursday to Sunday from 14.00 till 18.00
HISK / Higher Institute for Fine Arts, Charles de Kerchovelaan 187A, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

Film program: October 5, 2009 at 20:00
Art Cinema OffOff, Begijnhof Ter Hoye - Lange Violettestraat 237, 9000 Gent, Belgium

Mike Carremans / Brandon LaBelle / Gent Clapping Group /
Nate Harrison / Jeuno JE Kim / Raimundas Malašauskas /
Joris van de Moortel / Tisha Mukarji / Sarah Pierce /
Thus & Hence / Ultra-red / Katarina Zdjelar /
plus Jean-Luc Godard, Len Lye and Norman McLaren

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This exhibition, a group show in and out of sync, deals with the matter of sound and how listening is affected by a subjective notion of synchronicity. Or, we could say it is about the fact that one and one is never two, but one and one.

The selection of art works on show investigates listening as a simultaneous activity. Based on the simple fact that every listening situation coincides with other sonic or visual influences, the show largely explores a dialogue on the processes behind simultaneous levels of perception. On various levels the artists observe how listening in particular has the ability to fabricate and deconstruct an idea of synchronicity, and with it a desire for and against it. Ultimately, every work sets out a different direction to turn these observations into a terrain for critical inquiry.

After All, Everything Is Different In The End is the second show of a trilogy in the framework of Sonic Thinking, a long-term curatorial research project on listening in the current art discourses. In an attempt to open up new spaces where critical positions and new perspectives on sound and listening can merge to enable a radical sonic thinking, the show leaves the boundaries of the unitary exhibition/listening space behind and explores unknown fields: things happen in distant places simultaneously, a radio station broadcasts the imagination of a radio broadcast, the audience is invited to submit invisible sculptures, one hundred people act as metronomes and sounds are teleported to spy out military grounds.

As bonus tracks, the show includes a film evening and a radio broadcast:

October 5, 20.00 Film night
"Weekend" by Jean-Luc Godard and short films by Len Lye and Norman McLaren
With an introduction by Hans Martens, Artistic director HISK
Art Cinema OFFoff, Begijnhof ter Hoye, Lange Violettestraat 237, B-9000 Ghent

October 10, 02.00 "Radio Dinner" by Raimundas Malašauskas
Radio Urgent FM 105.3

To stay true to its initial idea, eight different press releases have been prepared by different people. You can download them on the project website at http://sonicthinking.org/simultaneity.html

Curated by Jens Maier-Rothe

Supported by the Flemish Community in the framework of Curator Curator, a project initiated by Maarten Vanden Eynde and Maaike Gouwenberg in collaboration with the HISK.

Artists


Mike Carremans, "Peninsula", 2009

Peninsula is a soundtrack of a painting being made. By placing a microphone onto the backside of the canvas the artist recorded the different rhythms and approaches of painterly gestures onwards the surface. Based on these recordings the painter created a soundtrack of his work. In a certain way the canvas starts to function as a pallet, but instead of being the foundation for a visual chromatic array it becomes the intermediator for an auditive one. By removing the actual canvas itself the painting loses every indication of size, but clearly turns into a form that emphasizes the scale of the work depending on the space where it is shown. As for being a colour-blind painter whose work concerns the problematic of colour-use and the truthfulness of appearances as commonly perceived images, the translation of colour into sound is an interesting way of reconfiguring chromatic systems. Mostly beclouded by experimental music and daily noises in the studio, listening plays an important role but it does not manifest itself directly in the paintings. Sound and image rather constitute two parallel universes that only come together in the artist's mind. The piece establishes a stereo situation in the bathroom, where the left channel is mounted in the left toilet both and the right channel in the one to the right. Visitors may feel connected metaphorically when using the bathroom simultaneously, whereas they can also enjoy the acoustically safe environment. The artist felt inspired by Japanese bathrooms with optional ambient music to tone down undesired noises.

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Gent Clapping Group, "Performance at the opening and finissage", 2009

The Gent Clapping Group was founded by Audrey Cottin and includes varying members such as Lara Dhondt, Hedwig Houben, Emi Kodama, Bas Schevers, Lauren von Gogh and others. In their performances the group composes volumes by clapping. It is open for other people, specialists or not, to participate and as such it is constantly reconstituting itself, redesigning its amateurism and privileging enthusiasm.

"We feel local vernacular but the thing is that we are also very much vehiculaire...".

Dates: September 25, 20.00 and October 18, 18.00 at the HISK.

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Brandon LaBelle, "Concert", 2004

Concert is a video work presented on three monitors. The first video consists of finding people in spatial situations: sitting at a cafe table, waiting in line, walking through an open square, sitting in an open window, going up an escalator. The second and third videos act as translations of the first: LaBelle asked various people to listen to the sounds of the first video, without seeing the corresponding images, and attempt to describe what they are hearing - to tell us the scene, the location, the time and atmosphere. The final work is presented as a "trio", with the first video in the center, bracketed by people's responses. The only sound is that of the second and third videos, which replaces the original soundtrack in favor of people’s vocal descriptions. The work forms a play of place and its aural life by recasting the urban environment with personal portraits.

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Nate Harrison, "The (quick) Time Machine", 2003

The (quick) Time Machine is a re-presentation of the 1960 film adaptation of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine. The film was separated into every one of its 'hard' edits, which were then made into video loops. Each loop was subsequently sequenced according to the original storyline across a 40-block grid, read left to right, top to bottom. At any given moment the audio is in sync with one of the grid spaces, until that space starts looping, at which point the adjacent right block begins, with the audio syncing to it. When the grid fills up the process starts over in the top left corner. The video, through its structure of exactly 1000 edits over the length of the original film, ends in the bottom right hand corner.

Two-channel projection with sound, total run time 103 mins.

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Jeuno JE Kim, "Paris + English = Parish", 2006 & "Cheerleading is all about synchronicity, until you fall and hurt yourself", 2009

Paris + English = Parish is a composition with three elements – color, voice, and text. The piece begins where all three elements are asynchronous in their relationship to each other, but gradually progresses to be “in chorus”.  The objective is to question the relationship between sight and sound and how voice or voices can be linked to degrees in saturation of a color. The text read aloud by three men draws from Derrida’s Memoirs of The Blind, where he explicates drawing as a memory-act, one where a kind of direct seeing is replaced with a mediated one which is itself blind.
Kim's drawing is an ironic take on the drill in cheerleader teams and the erotic fantasies and desires it causes and destroys. The cheerleader girl is emblematic for normative sexual behaviour and bodily success. Keeping up with the rhythm is sexy. But what if you fall, if you are asynchronous? Nobody wants to watch a cheerleader that is out of sync, that's not good for the team. Especially not if it is the one standing on top of the pyramid.

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Raimundas Malašauskas, "Radio Dinner", 2009

"I don't play music, I present my listening practice" Darius Miksys

Radio Dinner functions as a DIY variety-show of parallel worlds. Rai listens to people talking, singing and reading in multiple times and places. One of them, a renowned psychotherapist Eugenijus Laurinaitis, is asked to hypnotise the host of the program wanting to become a radio-receiver for one hour with an intention to record the whole program for Resonance FM under hypnosis. A number of other guests, including Vilnius' artists Juozas Laivys, Vale Kale and Darius Miksys come to a dinner to talk about their practices of listening and to make a contact with an obscure radio conversation from 2003 dedicated to a screw, yet they end up meeting Anne, Ieva and Vesta, their own female avatars on air. The idea of absolute radio archive where sounds of the 18 August 1975 of Luxembourg radio are playing at the same time as forecasts of June weather of 2026 in Vilnius are unfolding is crucial to the Radio Dinner. The broadcasts of people mimicking sounds of cell-phones and parrots, Juozas Laivys eating sushi and transmitting sounds of his stomach, Rene Gabri and Aaron Schuster reading and commenting books aloud, PB8 collecting bird sounds from the streets of future, Gintaras Didziapetris installing the idea of the sound in the mind of Rai, an unknown prayer praying to an unknown God, and many other things will be played including the recordings of the infamous gathering at Locals International Restaurant which took place in 1973 and 2000 simultaneously.

Date: October 10, 02.00 on Radio Urgent FM 105.3 in Ghent and the nearer area

During the one hour radio broadcast listeners are invited to create invisible sculptures, inspired by artist Jouzas Laivys's sculpture modeled during the first broadcast in 2004. The sculptures will be part of the exhibition only for the duration of the broadcast. However, any kind of documentation material can be sent to us by email or post and will be collected in an archive.

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Joris van de Moortel, "Un Jeu Graphique Pour Jouer Sans Panique", 2009

Entering the exhibition space we are facing a hugely oversized score on the wall which tells us how to experience the exhibition and how to play and interconnect all the pieces, installations and events we are about to see and hear. Partly musical/graphic score, partly architectural plan, on the one hand the 4 x 1 meter big piece by artist Joris van de Moortel plays with the spatial and temporal dimensions of the exhibition and depicts it as an experience or 'composition'. On the other hand, it offers a humorous reading of both pedagogical gestures given by any exhibition maker and the often overdimensioned intellectual value attached to formal interpretations by the visitor.

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Tisha Mukarji, "Metronome series #2", 2009

Tisha Mukarji's performance makes reference to and is a variation of Gyorgi Ligeti's Poeme Syphonique, a work which used a hundred metronomes set to different tempos. For a 12-minute performance the metronomes will be substituted for one hundred people who will be "beating" time with their hand. Twenty groups of five people will each have a tempo that they will attempt to follow. For example one group will beat time at adagio which is 45 beats per minute, another group will be at 85 beats per minute, etc. It is a silent commentary on several different aspects of musical performance and synchronisation. Not only do the "time keepers" have to be synchronised but the substitution of metronomes for people is intended to display the primary feature of music which is gesture, although in this case the gestures don't produce any music but an illusion of time.

Date: September 25, 19.00 on the stairs of the Museum of Fine Arts MSK, Ghent

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Sarah Pierce, "Sonic Pass", 2009

The sound we listen to is a 14'48'' bootleg recording of the exhibition "Sonic Boom: The Art of Sound" curated by David Toop at the Hayward Gallery, London. Recorded in May 2000.

"The fourth dimension?! Einstein? Or mysticism? Or a joke? It’s time to stop being frightened of this new knowledge of a fourth dimension.
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, 1929

Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of a filmic fourth dimension, describes “overtonal conflicts, foreseen but unwritten in the score...” In a sonic pass, I move, sounds overlap, I move, I pass, through parents and children, through voices and footsteps, up concrete stairs, through rustling gravel darkened space, rotating neon and vinyl blinks at funny abstract photo sensitive walls. I see, I hear, I move through a fourth dimension. Concrete stares. Outside again, into the open air, through a man whistling as he passes through me passing through his whistle."

(Excerpt from the liner notes)

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Thus & Hence, "Secular Rhythm", 2009

Thus & Hence is as an artist duo based in Linz and Vienna. Since both artists live and work in different cities, collaborating over a distance is essential for their art practice. On invitation to this show, one of the two traveled from Austria to Belgium while the other one stayed home. They wanted to find out how it feels to think simultaneously about simultaneity over a long distance. A sign on the floor of the exhibition space marks the position of the traveler during the rendezvous. Spatial distance is both the enemy of and the motor behind our desire for synchronism: the larger the distance the more challenging it has been in history of mankind to synchronize events in time. An absolute synchrony can never be reached, hence we merely beguile our senses. Thus, the ritualistic and fetishizing celebration of synchronized light and sound appears to be nothing else but the performance of a desire, a dream that will never come true. The installation represents the atomization of a seemingly perfect audiovisual unit: The image of a mirror ball is projected onto a mirror ball, the wind of a ventilator, sensed by a microphone and transformed to electricity, feeds the ventilator with power. The looping beats and spinning mirror balls of the disco club have stopped, sound and vision are no longer creating an audiovisual whole. Looping within themselves and apart from each other like separate planets, they are split into two entities, one audio whole and one visual whole.

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Ultra-red, "Protocols For In Front, Behind And Beyond", 2009

The militant sound collaborative Ultra-red present a site-specific installation especially made for this exhibition. Two mono directional microphones are mounted on the outside of the windows facing the yard of the Leopoldskazerne, capturing the sound from the part of the building used for military intelligence and nursery training. All windows in the exhibition space are covered by walls, letting only a glowing crown of light pass through the gaps into the space. The sound the microphones capture from the outside is played back into the exhibition space on two speakers which are mounted to one of the walls covering the windows. Centered between the two speakers, a framed document instructs the visitor on how to interact with the acousmatic listening situation in front, behind and beyond the wall.

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Katarina Zdjelar, "The Perfect Sound", 2009

The Perfect Sound is a single-channel video work which explores and investigates notions of producing the ‘perfect sound’ within the English spoken language. The fact that we each have a unique sound and voice whilst sharing the same vocal apparatus intrigues the artist who worked with the relatively recent phenomenon of ‘accent removal’ to extract the ‘foreignness’ within a subject’s accent. The video shows the subject repeating vocal exercises with a speech therapist which demonstrates the unique qualities of his accent that are the residual traces of his spoken heritage. The subsequent words take on an abstract and musical quality with their continued repetition rendering them meaningless, transforming the word into a sound. Uttering a word becomes like striking a note on the piano trying to perform a composition. Ultimately with the ‘Perfect Sound’ Zdjelar’s work asks where is an accent and investigates the notion of acoustic tolerance which is being tested between a speech therapist and his client.

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This exhibition, a group show in and out of sync, deals with the matter of sound and how listening is affected by a subjective notion of synchronicity. Or, we could say it is about the fact that one and one is never two, but one and one.

To stay true to this concept, eight different people have been asked to prepare a press release. Please choose one or more of the following to read, see or hear more about this show:

Press release by Nine Budde, artist, Berlin
http://sonicthinking.org/downloads/press_after_all_budde.pdf

Press release by Jens Maier-Rothe, curator, New York
http://sonicthinking.org/downloads/press_after_all_maierrothe.pdf

Press release by Clara Meister, curator, art critic, Berlin
http://sonicthinking.org/downloads/press_after_all_meister.pdf

Press release by Cristian Nae, art critic, Iasi
http://sonicthinking.org/downloads/press_after_all_nae.pdf

Press release by Sarah Rifky, curator, Cairo
http://sonicthinking.org/downloads/press_after_all_rifky.pdf

Press release by Danilo Stankovic, artist, Malmö
http://sonicthinking.org/downloads/press_after_all_stankovic.pdf

Press release by Jay Tan, artist, Rotterdam
http://sonicthinking.org/downloads/press_after_all_tan.pdf

Press release by Chimp Wonder, artist, Copenhagen
http://sonicthinking.org/downloads/press_after_all_wonder.pdf

Get all in one package
http://sonicthinking.org/downloads/press_all.zip

Go online
http://sonicthinking.org/simultaneity.html

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Curated by Jens Maier-Rothe

Supported by the Flemish Community in the framework of CURATOR CURATOR, a project initiated by Maarten Vanden Eynde and Maaike Gouwenberg in collaboration with the HISK.
Thanks to Off Off Cinema for the film night on the 5th of October

-> http://www.enoughroomforspace.org/projects/view/17