A group of performers, sound and visual artists are gathering together to collaborate and present sounds, performances, visuals and readings to celebrate the numerous species of bat. For artists who work with sound the echolocating skill of bats is a particularly rich source of inspiration but it is also their endangered status that prompts this event as well as their generally poor reputation. Many bat species are in a vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered state and because bats reproduce slowly, recovery from population loss is slow. Bats exist everywhere on the planet except the extremes of the North and South poles yet are the most under-researched of all mammals. They play an important ecological role in the form of pest control, as pollinators and as seed dispersers, yet bats have poor reputations in most cultures where they are feared as sinister beings. It is only in China where bats have always been celebrated as creatures of good luck and happiness. Our night of collaboration takes its inspiration from this positive embrace of the lives of bats.
With
Robbie Judkins (UK)
Helen Frosi (UK)
Viv Corringham (UK/US)
Melissa Alley (UK)
Jude Cowan Montague (UK)
Mia Kukathasan (UK)
Paul Tecklenberg (UK)
Johanna Hällsten (Sweden/UK)
Ackroyd+Harvey (UK)
Iris Garrelfs (Germany/UK)
Shauna Laurel Jones (US/UK)
Catherine Clover (UK/Australia)
Doors 7:30 | performance from 8pm | entry £5 (profits to be donated to to Bat Conservation International)
Catherine Clover
Catherine Clover’s multidisciplinary practice addresses communication through voice, language and the interplay between hearing/listening, seeing/reading. Using field recording, digital imaging and the spoken/written word she explores an expanded approach to language within and across species. The artworks are social in nature and frequently involve collaboration and participation with other artists as well as with audiences.
www.ciclover.com
Robbie Judkins is a sound artist and musician with a focus on performance, improvisation, composition and broadcasting. Robbie is the creator of Animal Sounds (Resonance FM) and also performers under the moniker Left Hand Cuts off the Right. He is particularly interested in animal rights, sonic activism, mental health issues and listening.
Helen Frosi is an artist-curator and producer whose work pivots around ecology, systems-based thinking and the sonic imagination. Helen is Director of SoundFjord a nomadic curatorial platform, Co-Curator of Longplayer Day and Founder of Visible Near Midnight Recordings. She is also a visiting fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London.
www.soundfjord.org
Iris Garrelfs is an artist working on the cusp of music, art, and sociology across improvised performance, multi-channel installations and fixed media projects. At Goldsmiths she co-heads the Unit for Sound Practice Research (SPR) and leads the Pathway MMus Sonic Art. As one of the first UK artists that combine voice with digital processing, Iris is interested in modes of listening as a way of connecting to the world.
Viv Corringham is a singer and soundscape artist, active since the late 1970s. Her work includes concerts, soundwalks and multi-channel installations. She holds an MA in Sonic Art and a Deep Listening teaching certificate. Her work has been presented in twenty six countries on five continents.
vivcorringham.org
Paul Tecklenberg
Much of Tecklenberg’s practice is about perception; revealing what is hidden. This is an image from a kinetic light sculpture he exhibited in the London Group’s ‘Into the Dark’ show. For this event, he will be showing a kinetic mirrored sculpture and project images onto the surface and surrounding space.
Jude Cowan Montague is a composer obsessed with vintage organs. She worked at Reuters for ten years and her poetry collections of poetry ‘For the Messengers’ and ‘The Wires’ respond to Reuters television news stories. She is an award-winning printmaker creating signature monoprints from her workshop in St Leonards-on-Sea and creates a regular radio programme ‘The News Agents’ for Resonance FM, a show exploring some of the places that news meets arts.
Artistic duo Ackroyd & Harvey are internationally acclaimed for time-based artworks that explore processes of organic and inorganic growth, change and decay through a variety of media including sculpture, photography, print and film. Intersecting art with disciplines of architecture, biology, ecology and history, their work reveals an intrinsic bias towards process and event, reflecting scientific and environmental concerns that reference urban political ecologies, climate breakdown and biodiversity loss.
Johanna Hällsten is a Swedish born artist and lecturer now living in the UK. Working with text, sound and performance, Hällsten’s work focuses on translation between different cultures, species, and forms, to address the interrelation between sounds and environments, and the transience of the sound spaces created through movement. Attempting to give voice to phenomena we do not normally think of as having a voice; she often works collaboratively.
Melissa Alley
Melissa Alley’s practice intends to give presence to the forgotten or overlooked through paintings and performance. She creates her (inner) portrait paintings through empathising and following her intuition. Bats define their position by sending out a signal and picking up the echo. Melissa in comparison, enters an altered state and picks up information and creates auto trance drawings and paintings from people, photographs, signatures and objects. Melissa will be creating auto trance drawings of visitors to this event.
Shauna Laurel Jones is an American-born, Iceland-bred, London-based writer with a background in art history and environmental studies. Her research combines her interests in human–animal relationships, language, and aesthetics. Recent essays have been published in Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts, Carve Magazine, and Orion (forthcoming).
Mia Kukathasan is a sound artist, performer, audio engineer and broadcaster for Resonance FM and Threads Radio. Mia’s practice incorporates field recordings, archival material and found objects as sound sources to create soundscapes that straddle the imagined and the tangible.
