DISCONTINUITY PROGRAMME
Michael Maierhof Workshop
Darmstadt Kunsthalle
NORTHWEST & NORTHEAST GALLERIES
INSTALLATION
#popfem (2016/17)
Sara Glojnarić
Video 7’17”
#popfem explores the ultraconservative, right-wing, pro-life, anti-feminist, and misogynistic side of YouTube videos and transforms them into their opposites. Taking videos that were strongly based in hate, misunderstanding, and misinformation, as well as phobias of all types, we manipulated them into recitative text on topics we find relevant for (western) women today – abortion rights, rape culture and hashtag feminism, internalized misogyny. Essentially, we are using the same mechanisms as all of our protagonists do – taking information out of context, and presenting it in a specific way under specific conditions, in order to prove ideological legitimacy.
Sara Glojnarić is a composer and sound artist from Zagreb, Croatia currently based in Stuttgart, Germany. Her work is interdisciplinary, multi-media, and multi-sensory, heavily influenced by the aesthetic and sociopolitical consequences of pop culture. For upcoming dates and concerts visit saraglojnaric.com.
PERFORMANCES
Antigone (2018)
Sasha Amaya and Naomi Woo
Performed by Sasha Amaya, Naomi Woo, and participatory chorus
Antigone invites the audience to participate as a Greek chorus conversing, observing, and commenting on the story of Anne Carson’s Antigonick (2012), her translation of the original Sophocles.
tick tock (Sasha Amaya and Naomi Woo) interprets and creates performances in sound and movement. Sasha Amaya works in choreography, direction, and installation. Naomi Woo is a pianist, conductor, and musicologist. .tt-tt-tt.com
Hey Leo (2018)
Leo Hofmann
Omnidirectional chatterbot melodrama for voices and electronics
A few months ago, I caught my virtual voice assistant singing in its free time. I shut down the device and pulled the plug, but the song kept haunting me. Now, I run the assistant day and night close to my side. But it remains silent. And I wonder, if only someone could wake it up?
Leo Hofmann (CH/DE) creates, composes, and performs concerts, performances, music theater, and audio dramas. He works with voice, movement, and electronics, examining music situated between medial immutability and transience, and addressing the visual in musical performance and the physical in sound. leohofmann.com
Musica Ficta (2018)
Caroline Louise Miller
Performed by Caroline Louise Miller, Sasha Amaya, Celeste Oram, Alex Taylor, and Naomi Woo
Sci-fi films created during the 1950’s-era cold war are filled with analog electronic sounds that draw on sounds of alarm (emergency drills, air raid sirens) to create chilling and otherworldly soundscapes. I find these sounds, used both musically and encountered (such as the tornado sirens where I grew up), to contain an intrinsic beauty. Musica Ficta is a meditation on dreams, communication, and fear.
Caroline Louise Miller’s music explores affect, biomusic, labor, tactility, and glitch. Her latest works have intersected with affects of horror and abjection, rising work hours (yet stagnant wages) in late capitalism, and hybridizing popular and electronic art music. Her music appears across the U.S. and internationally. carolinelouisemiller.com
GALLERY ENTRANCE
Five Lines on a History of Spatial Production (2018)
Perspektivenbox
Five Lines on a History of Spatial Production is a site specific installation around topics of topography and spatiality. Through audiovisual and performative means, this work attempts to construct and render perceivable figurations of various kinds of social and spatial structures that govern everyday experience.
Perspektivenbox is a duo composed of Julian Stiffert and Ui-Kyung Lee working on the edges of contemporary/experimental music, installation art, performance, and participatory art. perspektivenbox.com
Of such dying (2018)
Iman Jesmi
Performed by cellist Sofie Gerup with electric motors, plastics, and video
Of such dying is a multi-media installation that focuses on the concept of everyday sounds that city dwellers pass on by indifferently. With minimum use of conventional musical instruments, it steps into the realm of hyper-realism, finding its source in the sounds made by discarded plastic objects.
Iman Jesmi is an Iranian composer. He graduated with master degree in music composition from University of Tehran.
UPPER EAST GALLERY
Rückspiegel 3.5: Keiko Yoneda (2018)
Teppei Higuchi
Performed by Rino Murakami (lecturer), Teppei Higuchi (translator), Naomi Woo (keyboardist)
I heard about Keiko Yoneda about three months ago by chance. My friend in Tokyo, Rino Murakami, showed me Yoneda’s manuscript and I was quite shocked by her works. I asked Michel to give me an opportunity to present her life and works in this workshop. I decided to name this project Rückspiegel 3.5, since there was Rückspiegel 3 yesterday, which presented Beecroft, and there will be Rückspiegel 4, which will focus on Marbe tomorrow. Moving the focus away from only European or professional composers, we should also focus on non-professional, non-European artists. Yoneda’s life and works are really intriguing and will be, I believe, an interesting addition to the Rückspiegel series.
Teppei Higuchi @219159ikabruob
CENTRAL GALLERY
Speechless (2017/18)
Loïc Destremau
Performed by Sasha Amaya, Sara Glojnaric, Adrian Laugsch
“People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words. These, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.”
Letter to Marc-André Souchay, October 15, 1842, cited from Briefe aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1847 (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1878) p. 221; translation from Felix Mendelssohn (ed. Gisella Selden-Goth) Letters (New York: Pantheon, 1945) pp. 313-14.
Speechless stages the mouths of four performers in an electronic audio-visual dialogue about music and language. A dialogue in its literal sense (dia = through; logos = speech, reason), where speech moves through space and source. The sound is visualized and heard from the speechless performers’ lit mouths in a dark room.
Loïc Destremau is a French-Danish composer working with instrumental, electroacoustic, and multimedia set-ups. His recent work focuses on exploring core musical premises such as instrumental physiology and audio-visual perception, as well as the relationship of music to speech, text, and other linguistic features. loicdestremau.com
sasha amaya 