Experimenta Social (Distancing) #33:
Shifting Soundscapes
For the next 3 months our Experimenta Social series moves to a live online platform and continues to provide proximity to some of Australia’s most adventurous contemporary artists, researchers and creative technologists.
During this unprecedented time, as so many of the world’s citizens are isolating in their homes and our towns and cities rapidly shut down business-as-usual activities, we find ourselves dwelling in remarkable new environments on both a personal and community scale. Stripped back of traffic and industry, the daily rituals and routines of urban life, our world is sounding different to how it’s ever sounded before. Is this an opportunity for us to reflect and reconsider our aural lives and the role of sound in our environment?
This month we will hear from two artists whose practices do just that, prioritising sound as a medium and our hearing senses as a potent way to explore meaning and experience.
Fayen d’Evie is an artist and writer, whose practice pursues the radical potential of blindness. Her projects are often conversational and collaborative, exploring alternative sensory languages and experimenting with embodied typography.
Gail Priest’s practice features sound as the key material of communication and investigation. Her experiential work spans installation, live performance and video, immersing the listener and heightening awareness of the aural realm.
About the Speakers
Fayen d’Evie
Fayen d’Evie
Fayen d’Evie is an artist and writer, born in Malaysia, raised in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and now living in the bushlands of unceded Dja Dja Wurrung country in Australia. Her projects are often collaborative, and resist spectatorship by inviting audiences into sensorial readings of artworks.
Fayen pursues the radical potential of blindness, advocating blindness as a critical position capable of agitating ocularnormative biases, stirring intersensory conversation, and generating methods attuned to navigating the tangible and intangible, hallucinations, uncertainty, the precarious, the invisible, and the concealed. With artist Katie West, Fayen co-founded the Museum Incognita, which revisits neglected and obscured histories through scores that activate embodied readings. Fayen is also the founder of 3-ply, which approaches artist-led publishing as an experimental, critical, and poetic site for the creation, mutation, dispersal, and archiving of texts.
Selected exhibitions include: The National, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 2019; Eavesdropping, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2018; ee//hm, KADIST, San Francisco, 2016; Beyond Exhausted, Physics Room, Christchurch, 2016; […] {…} […], Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne 2016; Human Commonalities, V.A.C. and the State Museum of Vadim Sidur, Moscow, 2016; Endless Circulation, TarraWarra Biennial, Healesville, 2016.
www.fayendevie.com
Gail Priest
Gail Priest is a Sydney-based artist whose practice features sound as the key material of communication and investigation.
Gail PriestSydney, NSW, Australia
Gail Priest is a Sydney-based artist whose practice features sound as the key material of communication and investigation. She has exhibited sound installations and performed electro-acoustic compositions nationally and internationally including at ISEA2016, Hong Kong; Werkleitz Festival, Germany; the Sonoretum, Kapelica Gallery, Slovenia; Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan; Artspace, Sydney; and Performance Space, Sydney. She has undertaken several commissions for ABC Radio and released five albums. She is also a curator of concerts and exhibitions, and writes factually and fictively about sound and media arts, in particular for RealTime magazine.
In 2015-2016 Priest was the Australia Council Emerging and Experimental Arts Fellow, developing a body of ficto-critical work exploring what art will sound like in the future. Her upcoming projects explore an ‘ideasthesia’ of sound and text by developing a hybrid form of ‘sound-writing’.
