ARCHITECTURES IN AIR
Brixton Library, London
12 September, 2023 - 24 September, 2023
PRESS RELEASE
at the entrance on the left, there’s a high-ceilinged space,
its white walls traversed by service conduits, and picture wires;
a community space for workshops, gallery and private hire.
through generous windows sounds and views of the city spill in
mingling with recorded sounds and voices that come and go,
moving bodies,
shifting ephemeral architectures in air
Architectures in Air presents audio works and an evening of live performances at the Brixton Library gallery. A painted architectural intervention subtly demarcates the “empty” room as a site of potentiality and action; a frame for all that will take place in the space across the duration of the project – the audio and live work and other on-going activities that this flexible space supports. This staging device also enfolds the to and fro of exhibition visitors and other users of the space.
In “The Forgetting of Air’ by Luce Irigaray the idea of a solid ground dissolves in air. Air is seen to resist appropriation; it exists within us and beyond, allows movement, sustains us and is something we share. Thus, air has a political and personal import and is embedded in social and wider ecological relations. Using audio, architecture projection and performance this curatorial project foregrounds the elusive properties of air, breath, bodily movement and voice and their potential to reshape how we consider human agency. A compilation of audio works will play on a continuous loop for the duration of the exhibition – falling silent when workshops or other events take place in the room and during the performance evening. With the tools of sound and voice: “…We can make temporary places that construct a site of dialogue between sense of self, ways of thinking, ways of being alone, and ways of being together - an ephemeral social architecture with power to transform us in ways no political or philosophical solution can on its own.” (Micah Silver, Figures in Air).
The project brings together a breadth of female voices with contributions from an art historian, a specialist in Languages and Cultures of East Africa, an architect, fine artists, a dancer and singers: Anke Blümm, Emma Cheatle, Bernice Donszelmann, Tobi Alexandra Falade, Kirsty Ferguson-Lewis and Ensemble, Rose Gibbs, Ida Hadjivayanis, Jess Heritage, Kkx, Susan Morris, Isabelle Pead, Helen Robertson with Antoinette Brooks-Daw, Demelza Woodbridge.
The project Architectures in Air is organised by Helen Robertson with Bernice Donszelmann as part of the Outside Architecture collaborative artist-led group
For this exhibition, curator Helen Robertson has taken an existing work – my six-part Jacquard tapestry piece Silence (On Prepared Loom), made in 2022 for the library at St John’s College, University of Oxford – and translated it into a time-based projection that responds to the themes in the show.
Silence (On Prepared Loom) was woven on a Jacquard loom from a 50-minute sound recording, made in the garden on the other side of the wall on which the tapestries are installed. There is a window in this wall, through which the garden can be seen and heard.
The recorded sound was converted by algorithm into lines that correspond to the score for John Cage’s 1952 Lecture on Nothing, a spoken word performance that has silence at its core.
As Robertson suggests, through this curatorial gesture the tapestries are dematerialised, taking them back towards the ephemerality of both the original sound recording and John Cage’s spoken performance. The relation between projected light and the work’s silent representation of audio fuse with the light and ambient sound coming through the window of the Brixton Library Gallery, thereby re-enacting the work’s genesis.n