Sunday 11 September 2022, 2pm
Brigitte Hart, Rie Nakajima, Alexandra Spence, Lucie Stepankova, and David Toop join together in an aqueous afternoon. From mudlarking explorations along the banks of the Thames, to tape loops submerged in the salty depths of the Pacific Ocean, connecting backyard ponds to watery simulations in Japanese gardens. Five sets that flow together, traversing fluid materials and watery depths, real and imaginary.
Brigitte Hart is an Australian sound artist working across performance and installation. Currently based in London, her practice explores relationships between voice, objects, histories and ecologies, often engaging text, environmental recordings, remnants and archives. She holds particular interest in exploring the art of small sounds, sounds that can be imagined, and the memory of sound. Brigitte has developed installations, performances, compositions and workshops for Supernormal Festival, CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice), Wysing Polyphonic x Somerset House Festival, Resonance FM, Soundcamp/Reveil, David Roberts Art Foundation, Tate Britain and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (Audiosphere. Sound Experimentation 1980-2020). Her work with sound design has been presented at the Venice Biennale Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival. In 2022, Brigitte is developing a series of experiments around the Thames, sound and listening as a recipient of the Develop Your Creative Practice funding (Arts Council England). She is also a member of the London Bulgarian Choir as well as Shortwave Collective, an international, feminist artist group interested in the creative use of radio.
Rie Nakajima is a sculptor living in London. She has been working on creating installations and performances by responding to physical characters of spaces using combination of motorised devices and found objects. Fusing sculpture and sound, her artistic practice is open to chance and the influence of others. She has exhibited and performed worldwide. She has collaborated with Ikon Gallery(Birmingham), Museo Vostell Malpartida (Cáceres), Tate Modern (London), Serralves Museum (Porto), ShugoArts (Tokyo), Hara Museum (Tokyo) and many others. Her frequent collaborators includes David Cunningham, Keiko Yamamoto, Pierre Berthet, David Toop, Haruko Nakajima and Akira Sakata.
Alexandra Spence is a sound artist and musician living on unceded Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. Through her practice Alex attempts to reimagine the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment as a kind of communion or conversation. Her aesthetic favours field recordings, analogue technologies and object interventions.
Alex has presented her art and music in Australia, Asia, Europe, and North America including BBC Radio; Ausland, Berlin; Café Oto, London; EMS, Stockholm; Punkt Festival, Kristiansand; Standards Studio, Milan; AB Salon, Brussels; Radiophrenia Festival, Glasgow; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Sound Forms Festival, Hong Kong; MONO, Brisbane; The Substation, Melbourne; Soft Centre, and Liveworks Festival, with Liquid Architecture, Sydney.
She regularly collaborates with MP Hopkins as Banana and has released her music with labels Room40, Longform editions, Mappa, More Mars (Banana) and Canti Magnetici.
(She holds the belief that electricity might actually be magic)
Lucie Stepankova (aka Avsluta) dedicates her creative practice to object-oriented improvisation, live performance, interactive installation, curation and DJing.
Inquiry about our being in, experiencing and interacting with the world through the lens of deep ecology and new materialism are at the core of her performative and installation works. Lucie co-creates with objects and natural materials, field recordings, electronics and digital processing to embody speculative narratives via sound-making. The general aim is to encourage audiences to engage in listening as an active-creative practice, reconnect with and manifest emotions, and forge a sense of interspecies solidarity and environmental responsibility.
Lucie performed in the UK and Europe in venues and festivals including Hangar Pirelli Bicocca [IT], Lunchmeat Festival [CZ], Cafe OTO [UK], IKLECTIK [UK], Waking Life [PT], LOM Space [SK] and Construction Festival [UA] among others.
She runs Introspective Electronics, a platform exploring the vast frontiers of ambient-inspired music and featuring regular radio shows and podcast series. Together with the London-based DJ and producer Alicia, Lucie co-curates Terra Obscura, a quarterly event series inspired by the new generation of ambient-tinged UK bass. In collaboration with Christian Duka and IKLECTIK, she co-organises SONIC GARDEN, a series of experimental ambient and downtempo events at IKLECTIK's Old Paradise Yard.
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.
