Sunday 9 June 2019, 2pm
Please note that this a matinee show – doors will open at 2pm and the performance will start shortly after.
An event based on interpretation, four different versions and points of departure to the video work A Replacement by Sini Pelkki
A Replacement depicts a room with a window, a room that sets itself between a space and a photographic image. Consisting of different elements and objects that reflect and communicate on one another. Foreground and background merge and shift into each other.
Supported by Taike - Arts Promotion Centre Finland and Frame Contemporary Art Finland
Emma Hammarén is an artist who works with poetic language, often in the form of installation and performance. The works take place in the room as large format sculptural text, big blocks of handwriting or compositions performed by one or several readers. The starting point is either the artist's own writing or found material, for instance different types of instruction manuals, technical and mathematical descriptions, horoscopes, philosophical texts or poetic quotes. The exploration of rhythm and change through writing and spatial composition is central.
Emma Hammarén studied at Chelsea College of Art & Design in London (MA Fine Art), Biskops-Arnö College of Writing (Poetry and Fiction) and Södertörn University in Stockholm (Philosophy). Previous projects include exhibitions at Tyresö Konsthall, Konstnärshuset, Studio 44 and Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm, Remap in Athens, Tadu Contemporary Art in Bangkok and 1Shanthiroad in Bangalore, as well as residencies at Skaftfell Center for Visual Art, Seyðisfjörður, IASPIS / 1Shanthiroad, Bangalore, Surface Arts / H Gallery, Chiang Mai and Institut Suédois, Paris. Collaborators and participants in previous projects include artists, musicians, poets, translators, composers, radio producers and linguists: Sini Pelkki, Jockel Liess, Jeny Rengman, Cecilia Björk, Mamta Sagar, Ksenia Pukhalskaya, Mia Kukathasan, Hild Borchgrevink, Per Mårtensson, Cecilia Hultman, Linn Asplund, Rebecka Holmström, Hanna Rajs, Suzanna Asp, Mimmi Corneliusson, Ashok Vish, Anjana Kothamachu and IntraGalactic arts collective. Based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Ashley Paul is an American performer and composer based in London. She uses an array of instruments including saxophone, clarinet, voice, guitar, bells and percussion, mixing disparate elements to create a colorful palate of sound that works its way into her intuitive songs; free forming, introverted melodies. This blend manifests beautiful and simple musical forms against acoustic experimentation.
Ashley has performed or recorded with Phill Niblock, Rashad Becker, Nik Colk Void, Loren Connors, Heatsick, Aki Onda, C. Spencer Yeh, Anthony Coleman, Bass Clef, Joe Maneri, Joe Morris, Seijiro Murayama, Greg Kelley, Bill Nace and Eli Keszler appearing on such labels as Important, PAN, ESP-DISK’ and Tzadik. She received a Masters of Music from New England Conservatory in 2007.
Formed of musician and artist Rie Nakajima, Cafe OTO co-founder Keiko Yamamoto, percussionist and photographer Marie Roux and violin player Billy Steiger, O Yama O explores a certain domestic and democratic quality of everyday life, born through associations to folk music of Japan and a folding of myth, tradition, and routine; the non-spectacular and the sublime. They move between pop and the philosophical, defined by the overall space afforded to texture and movement. In small, delicate sound an intimate musical climate is established that reflects on life, telling stories of improvised clockwork, whispered dreams, small movements of the hand and the rhythm to be found in the shuffle of a deck of cards.
The group have performed since 2014 at venues and festivals such as noshowspace, Ikon Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, Supernormal, Borealis Festival, Mayhem, and allEars Festival.
David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This encompasses improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. It includes eight acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Into the Maelstrom (2016), Flutter Echo(2019) and Inflamed Invisible: Writing On Art and Sound 1976-2018 (2019). Briefly a member of David Cunningham’s pop project The Flying Lizards in 1979, he has released fourteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016) and Apparition Paintings (2021). His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual were released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016). In recent years his collaborations include Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Tania Caroline Chen, John Butcher, Ken Ikeda, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Sharon Gal, Camille Norment, Sidsel Endresen, Alasdair Roberts, Lucie Stepankova, Fred Frith, Thurston Moore, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Curator of sound art exhibitions including Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery (2000), his opera – Star-shaped Biscuit – was performed in 2012.
Sini Pelkki’s work evolves from photography and moving image, often taking shape as installations. Moving from abstract narratives towards layers of spaces. At the core of her work is the subjectivity of seeing.
In her recent work Sheet No4 (2018), realized on 16mm Film, she invited four artists; Emma Hammarén, Johan Jonason, Magnús Logi Kristinsson and Keiko Yamamoto to collaborate and interact in different ways in the process of the work. Sheet No4 explores the borders of photographic image, a restriction and definition. Negotiation of ones space in reflection to others perception of a space. A Tension between different drawn outlines. The title refers to a contact sheet, a sketch of a photograph. In Length (2016) she was interested in rhythm, repetition and gaze; movement between watching an image and being lost in a picture. The length and distance between the figure and the camera, and the viewer and the image. The name also refers to transitions within the image. In 2018 Pelkki released her first work in book form Arranged Lines photographic works made between 2004 and 2018. The photographic works are build from individual images that evolve from another, always towards and in relation to the space they are inhabiting.
Sini Pelkki gained her BA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design, London and her MFA from the Academy of Fine Art, Helsinki (FI). Pelkki’s work has been shown in exhibitions and different Film Festivals internationally. She has worked at residencies such as Cité International des Arts Paris, Quartier21/Museums Quartier Wien and Focus AiR Stockholm. Currently she’s working with a new moving image work Departing Shadow. Pelkki is based in Helsinki, Finland.
