6 Creekside, Deptford, London SE8 4SA (Link)
17th to 30th August 2020. Everyday 12pm to 6pm
Please bring your phone or tablet with a QR Reader and SoundCloud App installed
Note: There is no access to the gallery.

This is a window display of imagery by the artists. Each panel has a QR code in the corner that links to a sound file by the artist which you can listen to through you earbuds. Information about the artists and curators is on display in panels either side of the window.

Transmission

The last few months have seen a break in the regular flow of everyday life. The slowed pace and forced isolation were experienced by people, artists and creators in different ways. Some saw it as an opportunity for inner reflection, while others felt it was an external threatening noise - an act of disruption and interference in the order of the universe. This period that many termed "strange", demands reflection on the future of art and culture, creativity, cultural centers and museums, audiences, accessibility of artistic materials, the experience of observation and the observer. These are issues that deal with internal space, the external and political, the global, local, economic, social and humane.

This experimental project, the first to utilize the BALCONY network, seeks to evoke curatorial thought and artistic response in a way that bypasses the conventional dialog about COVID-19 and its implications. We asked for an interpretation, code, theme, dictionary, lexicon or glossary on transmission/disruptive communication or, to the contrary, a model of linkages and ways of communication. The works presented here relate to sound - related images, sound and visuals, types of noise and visualization, aspects of distortion and bisection of speech and language, exclusion of language from artistic vocal or linguistic creation in the spirit of Dadaistic manifest of Tristin Tzara (1918), in wake of the contemporary, global "war" that is claiming victims and leading to the collapse of order.

This is an exhibition of critical thought and proposition, which aims to a stand outside of the political and ideological systems that are represented and organized through language - and to break them down in time and space. The question is: what is music and language in the current era? How does the voice look as a contemporary image and what is the role of sound in the personal, public and urban space today?

Written by Drorit Gur-Arie. Summer, 2020

Drorit Gur-Arie, Chief Curator of BALCONY, Curator of Transmission exhibition
Doron Polak, artistic director
Michael Lazar, artistic and scientific development

Future windows:
Paris, Berlin, Pilsen, Stockholm, Montreal, New York, Lodz, Tel Aviv

The Team

Drorit Gur Arie Chief Curator of Balcony. Tel Aviv, Israel

Drorit Gur Arie is an independent curator focusing on multiculturalism, cultural dynamics in the geopolitical sphere, and the interrelations between hegemony, center, and periphery. She has served as director and chief curator of the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel (2004-2019) and was responsible for the museum's re-opening as a museum of contemporary art. She has curated numerous local and international exhibitions in Israel and the world over including the Mediations Biennial, Pozna., Poland, the OSTRALE Biennale in Dersden, Germany, as well as the National Gallery in New Delhi. She extensively publishes essays about contemporary art in books, exhibition catalogues, and periodicals in Israel and abroad and is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards. She is a lecturer at the Department of Art History, Tel Aviv University, instructing students in their final dissertations on exhibition-related themes. She also lectured on art and curatorship throughout the world.
 

Doron Polak Artistic Director

Doron Polak is an artist and curator living and working in Tel Aviv. He studied Fine Arts at Tel Aviv University and Talma Yalin (Tel Aviv) and completed advanced studies in creative drama in Berlin and London. He is the founder of Projective, an organization to help artists integrate themselves in the art market and Artura, which is committed to promoting public and community art. He has organized to date, more than 300 exhibits in Israel and around the world, including during the Venice Biennale and the Documenta at Kassel.
 

Michael Lazar Artistic/Scientific Development

Michael Lazar is a sculptor, photographer, performer and sound artist, as well as a scientist. He has participated in over 80 group and solo exhibition around the world. Currently, he is a lecturer at the University of Haifa, where, among other things, he teaches a course on Sound and Environment in Art and Science. As both artist and scientist, Michael is often invited to talk about the boundary between the two fields. Since 2014, he has shifted his full-time focus to using the tools of his science to create a cutting edge, contemporary artistic language.
 

Nicola Rae and Paul Malone London, England

Nicola Rae received her MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, and she is currently a UAL Staff Researcher at University of the Arts London. Her art practice engages with sound visualization in response to scientific data as well as live co-produced sound. She initiates and co-curates exhibitions with other curators from around the world and has become an important aspect of her working process as an artist.

Paul Malone receive MFA his in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London. He is interested in how the physical world comes into existence; how it originated, how it maintains itself and its relationship to consciousness.
 

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock New York, USA

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1996. His artistic and curatorial projects range across the mediums of photography, film, and sculpture. Currently, he is a Clinical Associate Professor and Gallery Director at Fordham University, New York.
 

Felice Hapetzeder Bro, Sweden

Felice Hapetzeder is an artist and an artistic project manager. He obtained his MFA in 2002 from the Fine Arts department at Konstfack College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm Sweden. He is interested in the aesthetics and social context of creative practices as well as cultural heritage production and manipulation of collective memory. One of his major projects focused on brining contemporary art to the small town of Bro, Sweden. This ongoing project aims to explore at how contemporary art can be a positive part of local life through artistic expressions created in collaboration
 

Sania Papa Thessaloniki, Greece

Sania Papa is an art historian and art theorist. She obtained her PhD from University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne and is currently a Professor at the School of Visual and Applied Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has an impressive list of curatorial work, including curator for the Greek pavilion at the XLIV Venice Biennale, co-coordinator for the Greek participation in the 5th and 6th international Biennale of Istanbul, Turkey and was the National Commissioner at the XXIV Biennale of Sao Paulo (1998). She has acted as the Director of the Contemporary Art Centre of Thessaloniki, the State Museum of Contemporary Art- the Costakis Collection.
 

Jan Van Woensel Plzň, Czech Republic

Jan Van Woensel is a curator, art critic and academic researcher. He is curator of international projects at the Faculty of Design and Arts. University of West Bohemia in Plzen?, Czech Republic. He runs the exhibition programs of Ladislav Sutnar Gallery and Inkubator: Mutational Space for Art, Paracuratorial Projects and Education. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Sutnar Newspaper, an aperiodic publication that focuses on posthuman theory. Van Woensel's exhibition concepts are driven by his labyrinthically structured thoughts that investigate the boundaries of art and the exhibition as a meta-artwork.
 

Marie-Cécile Berdaguer and Margalit Berriet Paris, France

Marie-Cécile Berdaguer graduated in Art History from the Ecole du Louvre, in Law from the University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and in Cultural Event Production. As a curator, she aims to promote projects and artistic practices committed to contemporary individual and collective issues. To date she has curated more than 50 individual and group exhibitions. In addition, she also organizes debates and performances.

Margalit Berriet obtained her Master in Fine Arts (MFA) from New York University, Since 1983 she has initiated multi-disciplinary and pluricultural arts events and conferences in the USA, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, promoting, via the arts better knowledge and appreciation of the “others”, while fostering a respectful dialogue between people of different backgrounds. She is the Founding President and Director of Memoire de l’Avenir (2003), and of (Humanities), Arts and Society Project since 2016 together with Marie-Cécile and In association with UNESCO-Most and CIPSH.
 

Thomas Linsmayer Munich, Germany

Thomas Linsmayer is a lawyer, art historian, cultural manager and event organizer. He received his MA in art history from the University of Munich. Since 2000, he has been managing the gallery in the Pasinger Fabrik Urban Cultural Center with a focus on contemporary art. He has out together over 150 solo and group exhibitions with artists from Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Norway, Netherlands, Russia, Czech Republic, Zimbabwe, Japan and the USA. In addition, he has curated a number of thematic exhibitions, focusing on areas such as urban development, documentaries, social issues and exhibitions with a socio-cultural character.
 

Tomasz Matuszak Lodz, Poland

Tomasz Matuszak graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz, Poland, where he has been teaching since 2007. Currently he is head of Site- Specific and Interactive Actions Studio at the Sculpture Department. As an artist, he works in the field of installation, sculpture, photography, video and public intervention. Many of his works are based on a sustained involvement with the environment of the gallery or any given public space. Department. For the last few years he hs begun curating and co-curating international artists and student projects in Lodz.
 

Manuela de Leonardis Rome, Italy

Manuela de Leonardis is an art historian, journalist and independent curator. She has been writing about visual arts since 2004 for the Italian newspaper il manifesto. She is the curator of various exhibitions in Italy and around the world and has written numerous books on and about art. In her curatorial practice, she devotes great attention to women and topics that have to do with the female experience.

David Bloor, Wave, 2020

David Bloor is a sound artist based in London whose work encompasses composition, field recording, installation performance and sculpture. A wave is a disturbance, a change from dormancy to activity. Using a modified music box connected to a modular synthesizer, the artist seeks to explore indeterminate actions and reactions. Sound and sonic events are triggered by the release of tension within the music box forcing a spring reverb tank to self-oscillate into feedback. This is then tuned using a bandpass filter and feedback into the synthesizer to determine the pitch of the composition.

Curated by Paul Malone and Nicola Rae, England

Joseph Dadoune, Universes CD, 1998-2003

Remainder Resident

My Head Split (Guest: Riff Cohen, special mix for Worlds project)

Joseph Dadoune is an Israeli/French artist and filmmaker. The musical pieces are part of a suggested journey into a parallel universe from his "Universes" CD. The artist slows down the original recording, and thus relates to the sounds and recorded phrases as raw materials, similar to organic materials. The distortion of sound creates an effect that recalls the conjuring of voices from the dead, from the depths of a vanished archive, in which personal confession and collective lamentation act in combination. The resulting musical collage creates a sense of mysterious, deep space, in which layers of past, present and future seem to collapse into each other.

Curated by Drorit Gur-Arie, Israel

Guy Goldstein, The Mighty Zoo, 2018

Guy Goldstein is an Israeli artist and musician. The song is taken from his record, "Memorable Equinox" that was created during a residency in Northern Ireland, while staying in a 200-year old "Curfew Tower." The complex political situation of the place contributed to his ongoing research on the notion of "noise," exploring it via different encounters between sound and image. The conflicted setting and the long history of physical as well as mental "background noises" colored the "noise" with political hues. The song refers to the Irish mythological goddess of war and to conversations the artist carried out with Raymond Watson, an ex IRA-activist who was incarcerated at the infamous Maze Prison. The song tells of the attempts made by the prisoners to communicate across the cells with sound.

Curated by Drorit Gur-Arie, Israel

Ondřej Líbal, Political Street Organ, 2020

"Political Street Organ" is an artistic response to the current times global resurfacing of political indoctrination. The emerging artist Ond?ej Líbal, a student of Multimedia of the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art, experiments with old cassette players, contact microphones, discarded electric organs, and other outmoded devices, to create multilayered audiovisual experiences. In "Political Street Organ", the artist performs a recorded fragment of a political speech, manually distorting it. His self-made box and the way to operate it, are reminiscent of a street organ that normally would amplify pleasing melodies, evoking a coincidental soundtrack to urban life. In his performative gesture, Líbal hijacks this device and turns it into a propaganda machine that effectively plants seeds of disunity into the minds of passers-by.

Curated by Jan Van Woensel, Czech Republic

Paul Malone, Virus Relic, 2020

Paul Malone is an artist and curator. He is interested in how the physical world comes into existence; how it originated, how it maintains itself and its relationship to consciousness. The work came about through the artist noticing how close the current psychological environment is to cultism. In Melissa Dykes' excellent short film 'The Characteristics of an Initiation Ritual' she recognises 3 phenomena, all of which are present today: Isolation for Purification, The Transition (the old self dies, descending into a state of liminality) and Integration into the New Reality (or Resurrection to the New Normal). Although she alludes to the shamanic 'wearing of masks', she misses that other item prevalent in many cults - namely that of the fetish item or holy relic. This work fills that void by narrating the discovery of our very own holy 'virus relic'.

Jenny Marketou, Are You Happy Now, 2012-2013

Jenny Marketou is a Greek/American artist. The work is rooted in histories of experimental film, animation and ethnography. The video is a sensuous, polyvocal montage of people and places, real and artificial worlds, language and sound. She uses her own sound scores or field recordings, as well as footage from broadcast sources to upend the progressive linearity of conventional storytelling in a move toward a narrative disorder and disruption. She does this by surfacing various historical moments within more contemporary ones and by mixing a variety of montage techniques venturing into narratives of destruction but also of hope.

Curated by Sania Papa, Greece

Brian McClave, A Garden, 2020 (in collaboration with Wendy Rae Fowler, Gareth McClave, and Tom Wichelow)

Brian McClave is a British artist. Through his audio collage and photographic time-lapse imagery, he observes the world in small increments of time that build up slowly into larger complex structures. The work is a second sound collage that transports the listener out of a city in lockdown, to another location, and a previous time. Audio clips gently weave chronologically through a full year spent in an English garden, including the voice of a resident gardener periodically interjecting with musings on life and natural cycles. "A Garden" is paired with "Apple Tree, One Year Exposure, Digital Slow Scan Photograph, 2017". As the title indicates, a single iconic photograph is presented; however, it comprises of thousands of slices of chronological photographs, resulting in an image that represents a scan of the scene made throughout an extended period of one year. The apple tree changes according to the seasons as we move laterally from left to right through the photograph presenting the viewer with an opportunity for considering the passing of time, not unlike a memento mori. The apple tree is located in the garden where the sound recordings were made.

Curated by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, USA

Nicola Rae: Coronavirus Mediatization Frequencies

Nicola Rae is an artist and a curator. Her art practice engages with sound visualization in response to scientific data as well as live co-produced sound. In this work, an electron microscope image of a human cell infected with SARS-CoV-2 has been processed through sonification software. The microscopic image has been analysed as sound through Sonic Photo, which registers each pixel as sound from left to right. This sonification has then been processed through a sound emission analyser, re-emerging as an image with digital glitches - as seen in the image within a Petri dish. These distortions reference the increasing layers of mediatization framed through different lens that the Coronavirus discourse continues to be subject to. The radiophonic sound of pixel sonification resonates with the increasing amplification of media data transmission.

Alexandra Torres Novoa, Just a Person, 2020

Alexandra Torres Novoa is a visual artist from Peru. She has dedicated herself to illustration, comics, mural painting, thematic workshops and fanzines. Her need for communication evolved around making the Peruvian woman of our days and the kidnapping of her visible sexuality. JUST A PERSON is a graphic novel, which begins as a travel log of a Latin American woman on her vacation to Europe. It evolves into an introspective diary, which due to the pandemic makes it an introspection diary; rethinking identity in times of isolation, this is a journey that has no return, in time, in space, in context.
https://issuu.com/aletorresdrawing/docs/template3. The musical composition is inspired by Torre's graphic novel and was composed by Swedish artist and musician Simo Brotherus.

Curated by Felice Hapetzeder, Sweden

Aviad Zinemanas and Dor Zlekha Levy, Amor, 2020

Aviad Zinemanas is an Israeli Musician. Dor Zlekha Levy is an Israeli video artist. The work set out to investigate a specific emotional condition named Saudade that expresses the sweet melancholy accompanying the recognition that the object of our deepest yearning will no longer return. Zinemanas listened to dozens of songs featuring Saudade as a key motif, trying to understand it as a reduced frequency and not a particular theme. This frequency is expressed in color, pitch, and length of notes, and not in the dynamic of specific narrative development. He created an audio track onto which he embedded samples from popular songs. Zlekha Levy created a similar reconstruction of Saudade as a video work. He searched for visual manifestations of the word "Amor" in blockbuster movies, which represent a more banal and popular perception of romantic yearning. He extracted the frames that expressed the digital frequency he desired, moments that became objects of Saudade. By focusing on fragments of movement, expressions, and physical gestures, he presents the similarity among various objects of Saudade and exposes the structure of the shared experience.

Curated by Drorit Gur-Arie, Israel

The Transmission window arrangement at APT Gallery, Deptford, London.