Aura Satz - Turntable Tableau ICA Live Weekend

AURA SATZ
TURNTABLE TABLEAU, a film performance, Sun 9 May,
ICA - Live Weekend 1 - Performance etc (produced by David Gryn)

Aura Satz presents a talking book ventriloquist act, followed by a live soundtrack to her recent film Sound Seam, performed by Alex Baker, Lina Hakim, Chris McCormack, Roger Orwell, Frances Scott and Aura Satz.

Sound Seam is a film featuring abstract imagery of close-ups of gramophone grooves, giving voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past. The hypnotic film uses microscopic close-ups of gramophone grooves, wax and acetate shavings, phonograph cylinder recording and erasing technology, as well as footage of the anatomy of the ear, where inner ear hair cells have been animated to look like a sound groove, and a gold-plated cochlea spirals like a shellac disc. Presented here at the ICA as a silent film, animated only by the surface noise of crackle, the performers enact a live sculptural sound-track, a spiraling multivocal counterpart, a cornocupia of voices recounting a tale of mourning and technology, a forensic love-story of sorts in which the voices overlap, echo and pre-empt each other. The cinematic stage is animated by a voice-over carousel, a spinning tableau vivant, a canon of voices amplified by horns set on a rotating stage. The layers of voice-overs narrate a tale which draws on Rainer Maria Rilkes text Primal Sound, where he reflects on the possibility of playing the coronal suture of a skull with a phonograph needle.

Sound Seam premiered at the AV festival in Newcastle in March 2010 as a complex filmic sound installation in collaboration with Aleks Kolkowski, featuring 20 original phonograph and gramophone horns, a number of hearing trumpets, and an 8ft auxetophone horn on loan from the Discovery museum in Newcastle. The installation will tour to the Wellcome Collection in London in December 2010. The film was funded by the Wellcome Trust, and was produced during an artist residency at the Ear Institute, UCL.


Aura Satz (born Barcelona, Spain 1974, lives and works in London) completed a theory/practice PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she held a Henry Moore Foundation Post-doctoral Sculpture Fellowship. She has performed, exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally, including the Photographers gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Britain, Beaconsfield Gallery and Artprojx Space (London), FACT (Liverpool), Site Gallery (Sheffield), De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill-on-Sea), Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea di Trento (Italy), the Zentrum Paul Klee (Switzerland). Forthcoming exhibitions and performances will take place at Jerwood Space, Barbican (London) and Chapter Arts (Cardiff). Her recent film Sound Seam, funded by the Wellcome Trust and produced during an artist residency at the Ear Institute, UCL, premiered at the AV festival in Newcastle in March 2010, and will be shown as a film installation at the Wellcome Collection in December. Her projects can be seen online at http://www.iamanagram.com

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Aura
• Satz
• performance
• video
• art
• Artprojx
• ICA
• David
• Gryn
• Alex
• Baker
• Lina
• Hakim
• Chris
• McCormack
• Roger
• Orwell
• Fr