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GROUPER, during her performance Heavy Water / I’d Rather Be Sleeping at “Cinémathèque Live,” Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2017. Photo by Joe Ruckli. Courtesy Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
June is sound art season across Australia, with the arts festival Dark Mofo in Hobart, Open Frame’s showcase of experimental, improvised and electronic music in Sydney, and the ongoing sound and screen programs of Liquid Architecture in Melbourne. This year’s newcomer, the “Cinémathèque Live” program, a series of sound art events created by José da Silva, was held over two evenings at GoMA’s Australian Cinémathèque in Brisbane.
What distinguished “Cinémathèque Live” from the other capital cities’ events this year was the predominantly female line-up. This was a purposeful curatorial move to focus on marginalized artists, including those female and queer, who are often side-lined in contemporary cultural presentation. The resulting performances had an overarching theme of pursuing the deeply personal via deconstructed and reconstructed abstract sound.
The opening performer, US-based Grouper, grew up in a commune known as “The Group.” Her name is a nod to the term with which members would refer to each other; at the same time, it alludes to the act of grouping sounds together, which is a key gesture in the musician’s practice. Her style in both sounds and their accompanying visuals is somewhere between sweet and dark, as well as emotionally intimate. The audio compositions are gathered from instruments, including original piano compositions, and from field recordings of places and objects that have particular meaning to the artist. The moving images are similarly abstracted and layered, and are assembled from footage of buildings and the woods familiar to the performer. In interviews, Grouper describes her work as expressing an increasingly personal value in her career.
Following on from Grouper was Alessandro Cortini, whose audio-visual project Avanti (2016) was inspired by the discovery of his Italian grandfather’s collection of old home movies. Cortini played delicate and expansive compositions while 8mm scenes of a family at leisure played on the cinema screen behind him. What emerged was a careful study of nostalgia that conveys a great deal of love, while eliminating conventional sounds that evoke feelings of sentiment.
ALESSANDRO CORTINI’s Avanti, at “Cinémathèque Live,” Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2017. Photo by Joe Ruckli. Courtesy Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
ELYSIA CRAMPTON’s After Woman (for Bartolina Sisa) at “Cinémathèque Live,” Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2017. Photo by Joe Ruckli. Courtesy Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
In a group of musicians who all interweave narratives of their personal identities with their treatment of sound and visual qualities, it was Elysia Crampton’s After Woman (for Bartolina Sisa) (2016) that stood out the most for its strange mix of poetry, cheesy 1980s synth, Bolivian instruments and cumbia rhythms. Named after an iconic indigenous Bolivian rebellion leader, the work comes from the US artist’s defiantly queer, femme, indigenous identity, and her recent revisiting of her Latinx roots.
To begin to round off the program on the second evening of events, Brisbane artist Lawrence English invited audience members to lie on the carpet and stage floor as he performed his latest work, Cruel Optimism (2017). The vast and dark sound creation was described by the artist as an overtly subjective response to current political crises. As a meditation on the nature of power, the experience was one that was suitably confronting as well as aurally and visually demanding. The volume built and the sounds soared, while a pair of strobe lights blinded viewers. We were left with an experience that shook us to the core, literally, and bore deep into our consciousness.
Overall, “Cinémathèque Live” is a welcome northern addition to Australia’s sound art scene. The venue is both an arena for high quality audio as well as a space that invites visual contributions from artists. This year’s performances were a showcase of what sound art and experimental music can be when artists push their personal identity and politics to the fore.
LAWRENCE ENGLISH, during his performance Cruel Optimisim at “Cinémathèque Live,” Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2017. Photo by Joe Ruckli. Courtesy Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
“Cinémathèque Live” was presented at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, on June 23 and 25, 2017.
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