Silent Stage
9th – 13th August 2018/ Kukiskes, Lithuania.
Artists include:
Andrius Arutiunian, Antanas Dombrovskij, Janina Lange, Fred Hubble, Páraic McGloughlin, Anne-Mie Melis, Sharon Murphy, Dalziel + Scullion and Jennifer Taylor
Curation/Stage Design/ Concept: Mona Casey & Tadas Stalyga
Silent Stage is an interdisciplinary project, which combines expressive methods from video and sound, art and theatre and is presented as part of the Yaga Gathering 2018, in a natural environment, under the open sky, and beyond the confines of traditional cultural institutional spaces. The selection of artworks from artists located throughout Europe, accentuates and plays on the audience’s awareness of being in a distinct setting, in this case a forest south of Vilnius in Lithuania.
Sonic and visual artwork, will aim to shift the audience’s experiential register in order to disclose the unheard and the unseen workings of the surrounding ecology. The curation is not limited to the selection and presentation of individual pieces, but also addresses this group of artworks as an ecology in itself. It is therefore important that the placement of art and objects, works as a composition with an overall sonic resonance and a spatio-visual rhythm.
Silent Stage is conceived not as a self-contained ecosystem, but as a staged environment which aims to create an experiential, phenomenological rhythm for the public and consciously treats this rhythm as a component necessary to complete the work. Such a paradigm is deployed in order to test the possibilities of a set-up where there is no on-stage performance and off-stage audience. By offering this arena for public’s play and interaction we aim to collapse this separation and to create a setting where the performance, the stage and the public is one and the same thing.
Silent Stage, will introduce objects which contrast with the landscape, such as geometrical forms – cubes which reflect light, projection screens and sound sculptures, which will contrast with the natural environment and help to aesthetically define the limits of the curated space.
The artistic content includes artwork, which incorporates the concepts of ‘other’ landscapes within the landscape, and human presence and performance in a landscape. In the former we aim to present video art pieces in which foreign landscapes are introduced to the Lithuanian site. In the latter we will present works, which reflect on the interaction of humans and the environment and the impact on global ecology. Selected works from a variety of artists across Europe, will enable audiences to better understand the uniqueness of landscapes, the particularities of site and the potential for cross-fertilization in a post-brexit world.
Andrius Arutiunian (http://andriusarutiunian.com)is an Armenian-Lithuanian composer and sound artist. His music explores the socio-cultural aspects of specific histories through their sonic artefacts, often dealing with ideas of identity, sonic appropriation and thresholds of noise and sound. His works comprise of electro-acoustic pieces for chamber ensembles, sound installations and multimedia pieces, such as his recomposition of NASA’s 1977 Voyager Golden Record. A video version called Voyages, made up of edits from footage from the Golden Records, will be presented as part of Silent Stage.
Antanas Dombrovskij (http://antanasdombrovskij.tumblr.com)is a Lithuanian sound and experimental music artist. He also has long term collaborations with a range of musical collectives and performers such as the laptop quartet Twentytwentyone, he is one of the duo Tiesė (The Straight), which is dedicated to massive drone sounds and noisy ambiences, makes performative works with Benas Šarka, Skaidra Jančaitė which involves vocal elements, dance and expressive staged spectacle and is the main man behind the mixer of the band Betoniniai triušiai (Concrete Bunnies), which presents itself as a band of audiopoetic tinnitus and combines abstract electronica with spoken words. For Silent Stage, Dombrovskij, will make some new sound sculptural devices, based on his Wind Harpworks, which will respond to the physical characteristics of the site.
Janina Lange (https://www.janinalange.com)lives and works in London and Berlin. She is currently working on her practice-led Ph.D. at the Sculptural Department of the Royal College of Art in London. Her work, which encompasses video, sculpture and new technologies,traces the migration of objects across physical and virtual spaces.For Silent Stage, she will show Shooting Clouds, a video of a cumulus cloud recorded from a helicopter, some 2,000 meters, above the River Oder, on the border between Germany and Poland. In this work, the aggregation of the atmospheric elements to create a perfect sculptural form (existing on film) which will dissolve again, and its relation to countries whose borders are made up of 187 km of the river over which it was shot, perfectly articulates the futility of such border-keeping.
Fred Hubble’s (https://www.fredhubble.com) work is often traces of events or objects that are vestiges of gestures. His work questions notions of authenticity, the nature of experience and the translation or transference of experience, whether a performance, a photograph or a piece of prose. He explores different cultural and natural histories through which he interweaves narratives and histories attached to place. The sites become a lens through which to view art and become a new language through which the place can speak. For Silent Stage, he will show a number of video works including, The Sower/ Aleppo Pineand Barranco. The Sower, is a performance of the artist scattering Alleppo pine needles from Spain in a wood in the West Midlands, UK. The Pine self-seeded in Andaluciaand thrived in drought as a result of the lowering water table. The tree is now deemed the apex predator of the local plant life yet has a particular scent which the artist connects to his many visits and memories of Spain. During the performance the needles are imposed on the new environment and begin to be scattered as one would sow seeds or scatter ashes. In the end the action devolves into a hasty ejection of the needles from the box, something closer to fly tipping.
Páraic McGloughlin (https://paraicmcgloughlin.com) is an artist living in Sligo, Ireland. In 2016, he graduated with a BA in Painting from the University of Fine Art in Poznan, Poland. Mc Gloughlin’s artwork engages with raw human nature, social behaviours and is concerned with the mind, time, decay, joy and suffering. He works in a variety of medium in which he can express his ideas, often working with the tension found between abstraction and realism. For Silent Stage, he is showing a video work, which is a composite of images taken from google earth. The work presents the earth as viewed through satellite imagery and focuses on the shifting and changing shapes of the landscape as seen from the skies. The contrast between architectural systems and the natural environment is something that, when seen from above, is very clear. It is humanities impact on the planet and the resulting structural forms which we leave, which is explored in Arena.
Belgian born Anne-Mie Melis (http://annemiemelis.blogspot.co.uk)is a visual artist based in Wales. Her artwork explores how we as humans experience our natural environment in an ever more urbanised and industrialised world. She uses digital alongside traditional media in installations, with a combination of drawing, sculptural work, video, stop-motion animation and/or photography. Some of her latest work increasingly incorporates interactive elements. For Silent Stage, Melis will show Nurturing, prototype 2, which isolates small sections of the woodland floor creating ‘an incongruous artificial environment’. Using methods of either covering or lighting with high intensity fluorescent lights the installations influence the growth of flora and fauna by simulating an alternative climate, reminiscent of the more extreme end of projections of climate change, where life is cast into an aphotic world of darkness or subjected to intense sunlight, which abates for only a few hours a day. Melis’ work seeks to ‘experiment with the idea of tending to a part of the wood by first sheltering it from direct sunlight and then providing it, at the discretion of the viewer, with artificial light for growth.’ This active participation on the part of the viewer illustrates the notion that our environment is by no means immune to our actions and that our influence on the world around us, however slight or localised, has global ramifications that in turn threaten the niche within which human life exists. 1.
Sharon Murphy (http://www.sharonmurphy.ie)lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. Her practice encompasses photography, video, sound and costume and her work is rooted in theatre and performance. Her interests centre on the performative aspects of photography and on an exploration of the essence of performance. She conceives of space as ‘staged’ and the body as ‘site’ where the outer world and inner feelings intersect. She is especially interested in representing the felt experience of childhood. For Silent Stage, Murphy will show a series of projected photographs from the series, There was a Child. The series is ‘of staged ‘self-portraits as child’ set in natural settings that are at once actual, the constructs of memory, and allegorical.’
Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion (https://dalzielscullion.com)are Scottish based artists working with sculpture, photography, video and sound exploring new ways to engage with the subjects of, the environment and ecology. Dalziel + Scullion, are conscious of living through a heightened period in time where various phenomenon are converging, climate change, soil and habitat degradation, air and sea pollution and population demands are just a few of the forces generating world-wide difficulties and tensions. Their artworks enter into this subject matter, inhabiting spaces and resonating out to people who come in contact with them. As part of Silent Stage, Dalziel + Scullion will show CROP, a single channel video work, set from a stationary view of the flowering heads of oilseed rape, a crop planted for animal feed, edible vegetable oils and biodiesel. The film observes the correlation between a warming sun, fluctuating wind and swarms of St Marks Flies, whose intensity and noise reflect subtle elemental shifts of sunlight and wind speed. Theses flies emerge to perform their mating flight around St Mark’s day, the 25th April. They mate, lay fertilised eggs and then die and the process of the birth of a new generation, after winter starts again.
Jennifer Taylor (www.jennifertaylor.co)lives and works in Cardiff, Wales. She graduated with an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London in 2007. She has recently taken part in a Residency programme in the British School at Rome and has a solo exhibition called Time-Sea, at Oriel Mwldan, Cardigan, Wales, coming up this year. Her work incorporates the performing body with sculptural elements, to create uncanny and unexpected events, where breathing and the lungs capacity to draw breath is contested as an innate human instinct. The work for Silent Stage is a series of Video Extracts, which express the body in landscapes, often as skin clad anonymous bodies, playfully engaged with forms reminiscent of umbilical cords, with life supporting balloons as sculptural attachment. We are always in her work made aware of the alien and terrestrial qualities of the performance, against the backdrop of familiar environs.
With support from Yaga Gathering 2018 (http://yaga.lt)
