hear the light
Main panel content
The phrase ‘Khanyisa ngo 18h00’ is isiZulu for ‘turn on the lights at 18h00’. Departing from a personal reference, the phrase reiterated by the artist’s mother urges the home to be lit up. It’s getting dark, the house needs to be seen as being occupied and not vacant, signalling that ‘we’re here!’, initiating a different time of the day, for the continuation of daytime activities to adapt into their nocturnal counterparts and, subsequently, to be awakened sensorially.
Khanyisa ngo 18h00 (Into a Time Sensitive Contribution) is a collection of sound resources that indicate that 18h00 is approaching. They can be listened to at the listener’s leisure or used according to their titles as ‘alarm clocks’.
Simnikiwe Buhlungu (1995) is an artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. Recent engagements include Notes to Self (Intimate 1), mural project, The Showroom, London (2019) and ‘Small World Real World’, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2020-21). Simnikiwe obtained her BFA degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (2017) and is currently based in Amsterdam, where she is a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2020-22).
Interested in knowledge production – in how it is produced and by whom, its dissemination and its nuances as a commonplace ‘ecology’ – the artist uses her practice to wrestle between these questions and their inexhaustible potential answers. Lately, Simnikiwe has been enjoying listening to gospel music and thinking about apiaries.
Chibuzor Adiele better known as @dj__dji is a visual producer who ponders what it means to be human and asks how technology can help us to go places that we could only dream of in the past.
“In my opinion we have all had a dream of flying once in our lives. We see the birds and other animals take to the sky with ease, it is something everyone thinks about before they realize how hard it really would be.
The experience of flying, or trying to fly is something that we all remember. There are many different ways in which you could approach the subject of dreams of flying.
For example, you could simply state that dreams of flying are common or uncommon. You could make a list of the different kinds of people who have dreamed about it.
You could also ask the question, why do people dream about flying? This is a philosophical question that has been debated for thousands of years.
I have pondered this question before, and have found that the answer is not simple.
Some people, such as myself, believe that dreams of flying are merely a fantasy. We all wish we could fly like the birds and soar above our problems.”
With Aerial Memories Adiele, has come to realize a rich and robust artist practise that spans multiple disciplines that converge in one unique moment. As the operator of a high end dji drone, Adiele expands his technical prowess into the realm of flight. The work Aerial Memories transports viewers into the drivers seat. At moments feeling like a documentary, then immediately transitioning into a dreamlike landscape that is equal parts meditation and roller coaster.
you can find more dj_dji work at the account below.
Dusk is the time between sunset and moonlight, which can be seen as an ‘awakening’ of nighttime. To think of dusk is to think of a transitional state, the invisible transformation makes people psychologically transition into a state of ‘evening uneasiness’ – is it the end of the day? Or is it the beginning of night? Owls will be outside, other animals start their slumber. The elusive change in the environment and time influences people’s psyche.
We believe in breathing new from old. Chen’s commission for ‘Hear the Light’ has been revived from 891 Dusks: An Encyclopedia of Psychological Experiences, which is a development of the second chapter in Towards Evenings: Six Chapters. ‘891 Dusks’ means experiencing dusk 891 times, also referring to a spiritual journey of repetition. The artist presents her research on widespread symptoms of ‘evening uneasiness’ in a hybrid structure that unearths a dreamy way of perceiving time through sound, text and image. We are invited to listen to a recording of selected entries and hear about the ‘symptoms’. Read out in English and Chinese, the recordings are accompanied by meditative music. A group of ‘psycho-poetic’ texts partly document the ‘symptoms’ described in the audio recordings, while some newly written texts focus on the experience of awakening. The embedded images flow chronologically, from top to the bottom, from sunset to sunrise.
Chen Zhe is an artist whose practice is research- and exploration-based, often tempered by a psychological inquiry of the self and her surroundings. In her current project Towards Evenings: Six Chapters, Chen uses dusk as her motif to explore the ambiguous link between visual representations and language. Her work takes the form of photography, installation, sound, objects and texts.
Selected exhibitions and projects include: Yokohama Triennale, Japan; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Australia; The 11th Shanghai Biennial; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Guangzhou Photo Triennial; Para Site Art Space, Hong Kong; The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; CAFA Art Museum, Beijing; Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing; Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai; Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; UCCA Dune Art Museum, Hebei.
In autumn 2019 the artist worked towards shooting a dance video with music she composed for three dancers. Due to the pandemic, the shoot was cancelled, so while in lockdown she had access to an empty room and filmed herself exercising the choreography by super-imposing herself performing the different parts in costume. The ability to project and superimpose multi-persona events as a way of exploring fantastic possibilities has both healed and entertained her since childhood. For Anat ‘awakening’ is the ability we all have as humans to activate our unconscious mind and to reimagine and examine and become, Many, Not Just One…
Anat Ben-David
Anat Ben-David, works within different art forms and musical genres, pioneering video and digital performance video installation where music is at the centre of her work. Through a process she named OpeRaart, Ben-David composes, directs, orchestrates and performs in her videos. During lookdown Anat has increased her improvisation telematic events with collaborators AWNJS and Corona Improv at Ars Electronica 2020. As a lecturer, Anat is leading performance-improvisation at various universities across the UK and abroad, she is also an associate lecturer at the RCA and Central Saint Martins (London, UK).
Recent projects include Kairos OpeRaArt, staged at the Victoria and Albert Museum for the Reveal Festival (July 2017) is one example of a multidisciplinary activity that combines composition, performance, video, and sound installation. As well as working on several albums as a collaborative-member of Chicks On Speed (since 2002), Ben-David has released five solo albums, all with accompanying video works. For her last two albums she worked together with opera singer Anna Dennis and poet/singer Richard Scott.
Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer.
His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundaton for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami.
He is the recipient of the 2021 Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, for the film Surviving You, Always; the 2020 Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conje, Portugal , and the 2020 New Vision Award at CPH:DOX, both for the film South (2020).
Over the past ten years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts, have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK. A key reference here is his 2017 text The New Conservatism: Complicity and the UK Art World’s Performance of Progression, available here: https://conversations.e-flux.com
scroll right
scroll down