Letting the Days Go By: FRIDAY PROGRAM

Gender of Sound: LISTENING SETS
Fri 15 June 17:00-19:00

Listening Sets from artists Natalia Rebelo and Alexandra Nilsson

This event expands from a series of listening sessions that have been hosted over the past months as part of the ongoing artistic research and development project Gender of Sound by Susanna Jablonski and Cara Tolmie. Attempting to find ways to listen together with specific emphasis on how we might perceive music through a frame of gender, the previous sessions have endeavoured to find a collective language to reflect upon what we hear, how it affects our bodies, its poetic dimension, its political and cultural implications and how this might relate both to personal and collective experience.

Carrying on from this, Cara and Susanna commissioned two new mixes as part of Letting the Days Go By, from artists Natalia Rebelo and Alexandra Nilsson, with the aim of offering a more considered and collaged listening experience. After each set there will be time to find ways to reflect together upon what we have just heard.

By searching for a diverse collective language in this reflection we want to begin to understand how we listen and what it might tell us about the preferences, histories and associations we each hold within our bodies. For this reason it is important that this ongoing process learns from a wide range of testimonies from friends, peers and a wider public so please join us! All experience or inexperience, passion, scepticism, excitement and taste towards music is warmly welcomed.

Gender of Sound is an artistic research and development project led by artists Susanna Jablonski and Cara Tolmie that explores past, present and future debates on the position of gender, performativity and resistance within sound. It is supported and funded by the Royal Institute of Art (Kungl. Konsthögskolan), Stockholm 2017-2019. For more information please see https://www.kkh.se/en/research/artistic-development-projects/the-gender-of-sound/.

Cara Tolmie is an artist based in Stockholm who works from within the intersections of performance, music and moving image. Her practice probes the site-specific conditions of performance-making by finding ways to vocalise and place her body in order to access the political and poetic capabilities of physical, written and musical languages. She collaborates regularly as ULAPAARC with Paul Abbott; as a quartet with Will Holder / Paul Abbott / Seymour Wright; on collective vocal group DRANG with Mia Edelgart, Deirdre Humphreys, Katrine Gjerding and Anna Waerum; and with artist Patrick Staff on ongoing performance Litmus Shuffle. More recently Tolmie has also collaborated on new performance Aphelion Slip with dancer/choreographer Zoë Poluch and artist Kim Coleman using intelligent lighting, movement and sound. Cara has exhibited and performed in a wide range of contexts including Tate Modern; Kunst Werke, Berlin; Tramway, Glasgow; Spike Island; Cafe OTO; Norberg Festival; Block Universe Performance Festival; Chisenhale Gallery; Counterflows Festival; Modern Art Oxford; Fylkingen; Whitechapel Gallery; Raven Row and South London Gallery. She is also part of the editorial collective for Cesura//Acesso, a journal for music, poetics and experimental politics and is a current recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award.

Susanna Jablonski is a Stockholm-based artist whose work exists at the intersection of sculptural and aural experience, with an emphasis on how bodies, both human and inanimate, become containers for memory. In her practice, she addresses the malleability and (trans)formative nature of each medium, often by employing precarious or vulnerable materials. Jablonski has exhibited in a range of international contexts, both as an artist and sound composer, including Moderna Museet Stockholm (2016), Art Gallery of Alberta (2016), and Nanjing International Art Festival (2016), Kulturhuset Stockholm (2017). In 2018, her first institutional solo exhibition took place at Marabouparken in Stockholm, and ran concurrently with the debut exhibition at Erik Nordenhake of Slow Wave, her music project with William Rickman.

Natalia Rebelo (b. São Paulo, 1987) is an artist working in Stockholm and currently doing her MFA at the Royal Institute of Art. Her practice shifts between media, often taking the form of works based on voice and text as well as video and installation.

Alexandra Nilsson / Solovkina is a composer and performer based in Stockholm, Sweden. Her work stretches between sound art, noise, electronica and free improvisation. She mainly composes and performs with trumpet or other objects and live-electronics. Lyrical as well as brutal, minimalist and maximalist, organic and non-organic, she creates both order and chaos. With a background in jazz and folklore, rhythm and improvisation are important elements of her work and performance. The interaction and borderland between acoustic and electronic sound worlds is also of great interest to her. In 2010 she got her Masters Degree in composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Her Master focused on music for film and she is interested in interactions between sound and image and narrative aspects.

Sam Icklow & Alistair Watts, THE MOTH
Fri 15 June, 19:00-20:00

At 8pm there will be a special film screening of short film The Moth (2017) from LA based filmmaker Sam Icklow.

An anti-dote to the summer spirit, The Moth sees a lonely insomniac negotiates the isolation and uncertainty of winter in Berlin. The gallery becomes a porthole for disparate temporalities.

The Moth continues the ideas of the evening around ways of listening and hearing each other, ways of coming together and being alone. Set in the dark Berlin winter, this is a horror inspired story of trying to speak and trying to listen. The perfect antidote to summery evenings. Berlin based dancer Alistair Watts will also perform gestural dance based works, which expand from the filmic world of The Moth and also the festival’s namesake song from Talking Heads ‘Once In A Lifetime’.

It will be an interesting evening of coming together through listening, join us. All events are free.

Sam Icklow is an Australian filmmaker whose work blends experimental and narrative forms. Sam received his MFA in Directing from the University of California, Los Angeles where he was selected by James Franco to write and direct two parts of a compendium feature film based on the book of short stories “Actors Anonymous” by James Franco and starring Whoopi Goldberg. He is a BAFTA LA Scholar and a recipient of the Motion Picture Association of America award. He has also worked extensively as a cinematographer and editor, and teaches in Entertainment Studies at UCLA Extension. He has lived in Indonesia, Germany and the United States, and is a founding member of the Berlin-based queer moving-image arts collective, NowMomentNow.

Alistair Watts is a Berlin-based dancer and choreographer from Australia. He holds an MA Architecture from The University of Sydney and is a recent graduate of the BA Dance, Context and Choreography at HZT Berlin. His work circles around themes of intimacy and estrangement, peripheral spaces and threshold states, softness and resistance. He has worked with Peter Pleyer, Przemek Kaminski, Melanie-Jame Woolf, Ewa Dziarnowska and Zuzanna Ratajczyk.