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Visible Assemblages; Curating Art/Archaeology; Curatorial Contemplations on the Conditions of Sound Arts in Diaspora; Hybridity within an Expanding Field
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Abstract
Visible Assemblages: Six Affordances of Curating from the Peripheries
In this article, the author offers a rationale of her understanding of self-curation. From her position as a native culture-bearer singer of Karnatik music from Southern India, now settled in Australia, a settler colonial country, she elaborates on the characteristics of curation that emerge as important from her perspectives on being and knowing. The key line of inquiry in this article is the role of artist-curators in giving voice to culturally diverse perspectives. Drawing on correspondences between theory and praxis, she proposes that curation is a transactional and interactive sphere of operation where the everyday lives of artists intersect with their roles as transnational creatives who must negotiate their migrant identities, cultural strengths, and multiple belongings.
Curating Art/Archaeology: Excavating Through/With Material and Artistic Performativity
The transdisciplinary practice of art/archaeology has created a new relationship between post-processual archaeology and contextual arts, allowing archaeologists and artists to strengthen their investigative and performative work. Curating art/archaeology presents new possibilities for experimenting with the present and the past. The performative gestures in art and archaeology challenge hegemonic perspectives and expand tools for surfacing narratives, presences, and absences. This essay presents an experiment in which curating art/archaeology methodologies were used to (re)interpret the archaeological spatiality, narratives, and artifactual records of the Ovil Mount, a proto-historical village in the northern region of Portugal. Through contemporary art formats and gestures, the static fixation of the past is resignified and mediated in dialogue with the present. The article serves to question the definition of artifact, archaeological objectivity, and the ways we relate to the creation of narratives in the past. It assumes the material and artistic performativity of the site and enacts its immaterialities.
Curatorial Contemplations on the Conditions of Sound Arts in Diaspora
This article is a revised version of an assessment I wrote before (Tabandeh 2022) in response to the conversations, debates, and shared concerns circulated among the participants of a music forum entitled Soundings: Assemblies of Listenings and Voices across the Souths that took place in August 2022 at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. A few weeks after the forum, the outburst of urban manifestations and civil upheavals in Iran in search of gender equality and social justice, followed by the sustained resistance of the Iranian people against oppression, stunned the world. The events of the consecutive months, alongside the ongoing war in Ukraine and several other concurrent conflicts around the globe, support the conjecture that more and more artists will probably keep crossing borders to end up in diaspora. In contrast, many others struggle to avoid becoming strangers in their homelands. In this text, I describe the sounds and voices of both groups as migrant sounds: those who have actually migrated and those who manage to project their voices beyond the border, even if they have never physically crossed it. This predicament is, of course, common to all live artists who need the presence of performers who must deal with real dangers to themselves and others. Nevertheless, the sociopolitical complexities of our time and the many ambivalences in the art of migrant voices, especially those of sound artists and composers, still invite further inquiry. In this article, I aim to reformulate the arguments of my earlier report to investigate the subject matter from a curatorial standpoint: What can event organizers and curators learn from gatherings of artists and researchers such as the Berlin forum? What can such events tell us about the challenges of survivance in diasporic conditions? And finally, how might this knowledge help us to encourage and facilitate similar “intercultural” encounters between sound artists from different ethnographic backgrounds in a community of new audiences and collaborators?
Hybridity within an Expanding Field: Entry Points To Curating Contemporary Music And Sound Art
In this article, we take a closer look at the issue of (dis)placement from both the spatial and a symbolic point of view introducing to the contemporary music and sound art curatorial field the term “entry point,” broadly used in migration or border studies. This term, both spatial and symbolic, illustrates the Other entering the porous borders between countries and cultures, or borders between disciplines, genres, media, communities, practices, and forms of artistic expression. In our study, we use the term “entry point” to analyze the variety of the backgrounds (both professional and artistic) of the young curators entering the field, the participants of two Sounds Now Curating Diversity Courses taking place in Athens, Greece, and Viitasaari, Finland. We are particularly interested in their personal and professional motivation, responsibilities, and reasons to enter the field of curating as well as the challenges and issues they face.
Contributor Notes
Charulatha Mani is a vocal performer of Karnatik music from South India and has a PhD in the intersections of Early Opera and Karnatik music from the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University in Australia. She is currently Lecturer in Creative Arts and Health at the University of Tasmania and was recently awarded the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Classical Commission for a multimovement compositional work underscoring climate action through Indian music and Sanskrit scriptures.
Pedro da Silva, PhD candidate with a FCT scholarship (UI/BD/151198/2021) in Archaeology at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra. Active and Integrated Researcher at the Center for Studies in Archaeology, Arts and Heritage (CEAACP). Works within the scope of the development of new mechanisms for transmitting historical and scientific content to the general public, namely through the use of new interpretive models and artistic installations for the exhibition of archaeological knowledge.
Inês Moreira, Principal Researcher in Visual Arts at Lab2PT—Landscape, Heritage and Territory Laboratory of University of Minho. PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge (Goldsmiths University of London), Master's in Urban Culture (UPC/CCCB) and Architect (FAUP). She completed her postdoc on Curating Post-industrialism (Univ. Nova Lisboa). Active member of European projects and networks, as EFAP, TRACTs, or Press Here.
Beatriz Duarte, PhD researcher with a FCT scholarship (UI/BD/04620/2021) in Art Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts (University of Porto) integrated to the Research Institute in Art, Design and Society (i2ADS). Her research focuses on curatorial and artistic potentialities of modern ruins for the experimentation with alternative modes of heritage thinking, mediation, and preservation.
Roozbeh Tabandeh is an Iranian Canadian interdisciplinary artist, composer, and conductor. With a master's degree in architecture, he is now working on a research-creation PhD project at Concordia University on the interrelations between music and architecture and the notion of sonic space in Iranian auditory culture. He has been the artistic director of many concerts and stage works in both Canada and Iran.
Iuliia Lashchuk is a researcher and migration activist. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Warsaw with research on gender issues and female migration. She is interested in issues of identity, belonging, and diversity, as well as ethical dimensions of hospitality. She is also exploring alternative methods of speaking about migration, such as contemporary art practices.
Monika Żyła is a musicologist, writer, and sound artist. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Salzburg, where she also works as a researcher. As a lecturer, Monika is affiliated with the Berlin University of the Arts, and the University of Vienna. She writes on contemporary music festivals, gender issues, global perspectives on music and sound, diversity, and inclusion, as well as curatorial practices within contemporary music and sound art. Monika was born in Poland, she lives and works in Germany and Austria.