Noor Abed works at the intersection of performance and film. She explores the emancipatory potential of Palestinian folklore, traditional rituals and myths. Abed treats all of this as a 'performance' of community, linked to narratives of survival and solidarity, both historically and in terms of activating this intangible heritage at a time when the survival of an entire nation is at stake.
 

Keeping Together In Time features a video of a group of people in Palestine singing continuously in a state of endless preparation for an action to come. Inspired by 'battle chants', the work explores the potential impact that shared feelings can have in creating and sustaining a community. It suggests the possibility of exploring a solid connection between the notion of 'synchrony' (synchronised rhythm/in movement or sound or voice) and social action.
 

This and other works by Abed are informed by social movements and everyday community life. She explores art as a form of resistance that goes beyond the binary mode of action-reaction. Here, singing and collective rhythmic movement create shared feelings that are important for sustaining a community.

Courtesy of the artist

Marina Abramović’s art can be described as an art of overcoming – an overcoming of boundaries, rules, fears, certainties. Only when these have been overcome can we truly be free. In her performances Abramović exposes herself and her audience to physical and psychological borderline situations during which (self-)control is transformed into a loss of control, and involving risks that could potentially result in death. In her attempt to free herself from her fears, her body becomes both the subject and the medium at the same time. These fears are a central and recurring point of culmination in her work as a whole: the fear of pain, the fear of suffering and the fear of death.  It is often the most basic acts of everyday life, such as sitting or lying down, speaking or not speaking, that are ritualised in her search for emotional and spiritual transformation – over and again, to the point of utter exhaustion.
 

Freeing the Voice is one of three early performances that were formative for Marina Abramović’s later work, as well as for performance and body art. They deal with the exploration and crossing of boundaries. The artist lies on her back with her head tucked into her neck, screaming continuously. Her voice initially sounds deep and strong but as the performance continues gets higher and higher, becoming more fragile until eventually it runs out. The performance at the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade lasted a total of three hours. In the three performances carried out that year, Abramović used her own body as the material and projection surface for a process of liberation of the three most important means of human expression – voice, mind and body.

Courtesy Marina Abramović Archives and LI-MA Amsterdam

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a researcher, filmmaker, artist and activist who explores the role of sound in legal investigations and political discourse. His research informs human rights and environmental advocacy.
 

His work Loud Speakers (remix) is about freedom of hearing. It refers to the struggles over the definition of noise in one of the noisiest cities in the world, Cairo. The work documents the artist’s intervention in the struggle for the city’s noisy landscape after the 2013 military coup (the end of the Arab Spring).
 

At the time, the military government was cracking down on the remnants of the Muslim Brotherhood (which for decades had maintained a ‘shadow welfare state’) and sought to limit the power of the Friday sermon. Under the auspices of noise control the topics of Friday sermons were heavily restricted, and all Sheikhs were required by law to read from a government-authored script. On one Friday in 2014, however, in open defiance of these new draconian laws, two of the 130,000 mosques in the city followed the artist’s suggestion and decided not to give sermons on the subject dictated by the government, the Prophet’s ascension to heaven. Instead, the two sheikhs held a sermon on noise pollution.
 

Sheikh Ahmad and Sheikh Sayed’s sermons cut through the sounds of the street, and so reclaimed the power to distinguish between signal and noise. They did so at maximum volume – not only to the congregation inside the mosque, but also to all those passers-by who were barraged by the mosque’s loudspeakers broadcasting onto the streets outside.

Sheikh Sayed, 10:05 min
Sheikh Ahmad, 9:48 min
Courtesy of the Artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg

Babi Badalov is a traveller, a migrant, a refugee, an Azerbaijani artist living in exile in France. The migration of words in his drawings, collages and visual poetry reflects his own migration through different cultural, historical and ideological contexts from the former Soviet Union, the United States of America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. As a perpetual nomad, Badalov is constantly confronted with the absurdity and limitations of language. He knows that the power of the word depends on its geopolitical status and the way it is written and spoken. Badalov is less concerned with questions of integration into culture than with a language that operates beyond normative rules and as such can only be a tool against oppression and domination.
 

Curtain Poetry is an installation that the visitor can 'read' from both sides of the curtain. Its undulations seem to emphasise the instability of language and words as material for various compositions and decompositions. The meaning of the words, whether understood or not, is written in such a way that they have a message of their own that transcends existing languages and cultures. Some words are written in Russian Cyrillic, some in English, and some just resemble an existing language. Some are written like Persian poetry, from left to right, but in Latin letters.
 

The word is central to his work, a word that is at once a visual image, a sound and an individual voice, depending on how it is pronounced. What is constant is the writing, or rather the drawing, which is reminiscent of oriental ornamentation.
 

Badalov does not create a new language, but in the parsing of different languages, in the visual and acoustic power of letters and syllables, he seeks freedom, not only for himself but also for others. Important references are the Dadaist strategies of free association, the anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin and the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Courtesy of the artist

selma banich’s artistic practice is grounded in explorative, processual and activist work, and is politically inspired by anarchism and feminism. She participates in local and transnational solidarity initiatives related to the ongoing feminist, anti-fascist, migrant and workers’ struggles. She is an expressive art therapy practitioner.

The Last Howl is an embroidered self-portrait on the artist’s grandmother’s handkerchief that captures a deeply personal journey through depression, burnout and the struggle to reclaim mental and spiritual balance. Dedicated to selma banich’s anti-fascist grandmother, Nefisa Muradbegović, it reflects on inherited pain, collective trauma and the cost of resilience in a world of cruelty and repression. ‘Through this work, I embrace fragility, honor vulnerability and reject the normalization of suffering.’

Courtesy of the artist

CO2 … a couple of artists is a collaborative formation entangling choreographer Nikolina Pristaš and dramaturge Goran Sergej Pristaš in a series of encounters with artists, experts and students, in this case the visual artist Marko Tadić, video-maker Hrvoslava Brkušić and sound artist Hrvoje Nikšić. Their work focuses on exploring protocols of performing, presenting and observing that disrupt established relationships between performance and audience in search of new potentials for social life.
 

Undecidable Question explores, among other things, the potential power of murmuring, a kind of pre-linguistic state that promises future meanings. The installation refers to certain socio-political turning points in the former Yugoslavia whose agents were the masses and their heterogeneous voices. These were later articulated more unanimously in myths that built different national narratives.
 

In 2006, Nikolina and Sergej Pristaš were invited by the magazine Maska and the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana to submit a work to be realised in 2023 and included in the collection of the Moderna galerija. They proposed a reconstruction of three mass gatherings from the ex-Yugoslavian period in Zagreb: partisans entering Zagreb (1945), student demonstrations (1968) and the final farewell to Tito’s remains (1980). The project uses sound archival recordings of activists’ and artists’ debates from the BADco. project Institutions Need to be Constructed (Institutions Need to be Constructed, 2016).
 

Undecidable Question interrupts the myths built on the voices of the past and discovers in them a vitalism – the possibility of repeating the collective will to achieve the impossible.
 

In today’s uncertain times, Undecidable Question seeks to activate the meaning of community and the pronoun ‘we’ with the help of the viewers-listeners.
 

Courtesy of the artists
Production: The New Post Office and Domino Cooperative

As a pioneer of feminist art, since the late 1960s VALIE EXPORT has been engaged in a critical and provocative examination of the role of women in society that explores the mechanisms of both mass media and art. Women speaking in public and the female voice as a construct of societal attributions are a recurring theme in her work.
 

The video I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head was created from the performance The voice as Performance, Act and Body, presented by VALIE EXPORT at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The film shows close-ups of the glottis in the artist’s throat. We see the rough surface of the pink mucous membranes and the opening and closing of her glottis, the gap between the two vocal folds in the larynx, while she reads out her own text about the voice – her voice. She is audibly affected by the laryngoscope, a medical device used for examining the larynx, which is inserted into her throat for the recording. This brings an image of the inside of the body to the outside, ‘the image of vocalisation of speech formation, as the breath emerges from the chest and the glottis opens and closes before the sounds are even formed by the architecture of the mouth,’ as EXPORT herself writes. In a shaky and sometimes breaking voice, she reflects on her voice while the physical articulation process becomes visible: ‘It is not my own – it speaks for itself,’ she says of the de-subjectification of the female voice. The technical medical intervention refers to the violence and repression associated with this and her audible effort can be interpreted as symbolising the difficulty in being heard and having a voice as a woman in a patriarchal society.
 

Laryngoscope camera: Erhard Suess
Courtesy of the artist and sixpackfilm

Farhad Farzali works with sound, traditional and contemporary music and folklore. His work is strongly motivated by the exploration of the different historical and cultural contexts of Azerbaijan and its neighbouring countries, as well as by his personal physical limitations.
 

His work Speech Therapy refers to his treatment as a child for stuttering over a long period of time. In addition to medical treatment, he practised speech exercises from a notebook given to him by a friend of a friend of his mother. This unique Soviet speech therapy notebook from 1985, full of exercises and rules, once belonged to a teenage girl who was being treated for stuttering in Kyiv. 
 

For eight long years, Farhad worked diligently on these exercises for two hours a day, alone in a private room. Over time, the therapeutic nature of the exercises began to take on an aesthetic quality, evolving into rhythmic poetry and mantra-like incantations. He used several exercises from the notebook as a score for his sound installation.
 

This installation includes Farzali’s recordings of his long vocal exercises – the sustained vowels ‘A, O, U, I, E’ as well as ‘M’ and ‘N’ – in a single breath. On two of the channels he sings these long vowels and consonants (as suggested in the notebook). On the other two channels he recites repeated syllables ‘кр-а, кр-о, кр-у, кр-и; пр-а, пр-о, пр-у, пр-и; д-а, д-о, д-у, д-и’ and so on, which his mother added to the Soviet notebook to help him with his specific speech difficulties as a child. Everything we hear can also be read on the wall of the room, where Farzali make the experience more tangible by reproducing the notebook exercises in chalk.
 

Speech Therapy debuted in an online format in 2020 at Galerie Barbara Thumm, curated by Thibaut de Ruyter, as part of a lockdown-themed project referencing Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room.

Courtesy of the artist, commissioned by Galerie Barbara Thumm’s ‘New Viewings’ (2020)

Palestinian artist Essa Grayeb examines narratives from the past and historical moments of collective memory, searching for their meaning in the present. Based on found materials, sounds and objects, he interprets these within the context of their manifestations in popular culture, interweaving reality and fiction. His film works often explore iconic moments of Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism.
 

The experimental video My Whole Heart Is With You is based on footage of one of the most important and poignant speeches in the political history of the modern Arab world: after the devastating defeat in the Six-Day War against Israel, the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser offered his resignation on June 9, 1967. Essa Grayeb analyses the political language in a montage including only the moments of pauses, taking breath and stopping during the original 25-minute speech to create a telling nine-minute silence charged with tension, uncertainty and anticipation. We see only Nasser’s mouth and close-up microphones and have the feeling that we are intruding far – perhaps too far – into his private sphere. Grayeb’s intervention produces a new condensed version of the speech by the humiliated leader, who seems to be struggling to find words. At a time when we ourselves are often confronted with this feeling, My Whole Heart Is With You shows that sometimes there are no more words.

Courtesy of the artist

Sound artist and researcher Ida Hiršenfelder works with bioacoustics and experimental music condensed into psycho-geographical soundscapes according to a holistic understanding of sound that goes beyond mechanistic hearing. She is especially interested in exploring the effect of non-human and non-animal sounds and languages.
 

Spiral Fluctuations is based on recordings of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) using various recording techniques. The artist translates the acoustic and electromagnetic spectrum of the medical diagnostic method into a spatial sound experience with a physical effect, building on a basic compositional score produced by the MRI sequences. The installation works with emotions and sensations rather than confining itself to a schematic measurement of the body. The sound is not only perceived by the ear but also by other senses as oscillation – as vibration throughout the body or as a pulsation of light. This means that the sounds can also be perceived – or perceived better, even – by people with impaired hearing.
 

Idas Hiršenfelder understands hearing – or listening – as a mental process of awareness that is not limited to the functioning of nerves in the inner ear. Here the body acts as a complex network of relationships between the individual organs and between the organism and its microbiome. If we do not think of the senses in a mechanistic and isolated, hierarchical and binary way (such as the senses of sight versus hearing), sound becomes something that we do not just hear with our ears – something far more fragile, permeable and versatile, something haptic.

Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist whose main frame of reference is the cultural and spiritual heritage of Central Asia as seen in the context of the transition after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its ideological narrative. Women’s voices play an essential role in her work, since it is women who pass on pre-Islamic epistemologies from generation to generation. Another key tradition in Ismailova’s art is film history. She grew up in a family of filmmakers and so was influenced by Soviet cinematography.
 

In Plea, a healing shamanic text is projected over traditional korpacha (upholstered seat and sleeping mats). Reading or listening to it, one finds oneself at the intersection of the worlds of minerals, plants, animals, spirits, saints and stars – in a chaotic universe without any hierarchical structure, but with a clear circular movement that runs from the expansion of the micro-world to the macro-world and back again.
 

The visitor can lie on the korpacha and let the text roll over their body. We might not understand the meaning of the woman’s voice and the hypnotic rhythms of the poem, yet they have a calming effect, especially when we are lying down. We can immerse ourselves in Plea and allow the healing ritual to take place, or we can simply observe. Plea works on many levels – it is an activation of ancestral knowledge and at the same time a tool to reflect on one’s own experience from a more distant position. Plea speaks of belonging to a specific tradition, but at the same time emancipating oneself from its confinement. The projected text reminds us of the coexistence of oral history and text, tradition and modern culture, and the pitfalls of both.

Courtesy of the artist

Political resistance lies at the heart of Anna Jermolaewa’s work. Born in Leningrad in the USSR, as co-founder of an opposition party and co-editor of a newspaper critical of the regime the conceptual artist had to leave the Soviet Union in 1989. She was granted political asylum in Austria. Non-violent protests against repressive regimes and revolutionary movements in dictatorships play a crucial role in her work. She is interested in the diverse languages and forms of expression found by this resistance, and explores the aesthetics of protest and the medialisation of resistance movements – particularly in the adoption of artistic strategies.
 

The ‘Singing Revolution’ refers to the peaceful mass protests in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania calling for independence from the Soviet Union between 1988 and 1991. The name comes from large groups of people gathering and expressing their desire for freedom through collective singing.
 

For Singing Revolution, the artist assembled a choir in each of the three Baltic capitals to sing some of the movements’ liberation songs. In the documentary-style videos, the protagonists are less playing roles than taking action as representatives for a critical civil society. As part of a choir, in the collective practice of singing together the individuals become a movement – as most feared by authoritarian rulers like Vladimir Putin. Because, as Vanessa Joan Müller writes, ‘only the physical presence of many in real space creates pictures whose global circulation builds up the pressure that erodes outdated structures’ and brings down regimes.

Camera: Anna Jermolaewa, Scott Clifford Evans
Courtesy of the artist

Greek-British artist Mikhail Karikis’s work focuses on listening as an artistic strategy. In collaboration with people from outside the field of art, he develops socially embedded projects that inspire an activist imaginary, allowing us to envisage alternative forms of human action for a potential solidarity-oriented, socially and ecologically just future.
 

The work SeaWomen arose from an encounter with the Haenyeo, a group of older women on the North Pacific island of Jeju, which is part of South Korea. The immersive sound and video installation shows the everyday working life of the women at sea and allows us to plunge into their acoustic environment. The sea women freedive in the depths of the ocean without oxygen to search for pearls and harvest seafood. Since the 1970s, this ancient female profession has been the island’s main economic activity and has established a matriarchal social system. In a reversal of traditional gender roles, the women uphold their sustainable ecofeminist work practices and, against the trend of industrialisation, maintain a collective economy together with a joie de vivre and independence in old age.
 

Among the violent sea storms and working songs to the rhythmic beat of the rowing what stands out is a distinctive whistling, dolphin-like sound. Both alarming and joyous, the sumbisori comes from the traditional breathing technique of the divers, marking the horizon between life and death and passed down from generation to generation.
 

Courtesy of the artist

The works of Kherson-born artist, musician and researcher Anton Kats, also known as the performer ILYICH, deliberately blur the lines between visual art, performance and social engagement. He develops projects that explore themes such as expulsion, anti-fascism and the non-normative. Sound and its social dimension are the central element of his practice.
 

The mobile radio sound system ... mission is a response to the wounded to killed ratio in modern wars, which stands between 3:1 and 10:1. Beyond the silent price of survival, countries at war require up to 10 times as many wheelchairs and crutches to be mobile. The radio sound system explores the key questions of radio transmission: Who transmits what, to whom? What is transmission? Why is something transmitted? Kats uses the project in order to scrutinise the present: What is the … mission of war? In leaving space for other meanings, the artist reminds us that the radio is a medium for emergencies: when all other channels of communication fall silent, social organisms reappear via the radio. Just as radio offers a space for unheard voices, Kats explores listening as a social and generative force that reflects the conditions of politics, culture and psyche in times of war and conflict.


As an art object that calls for a participatory dimension, … mission takes a critical look at the phenomenon of the voice and community building and perforates the untouchability of the power relations between transmitter and receiver. It can be taken out of the exhibition space and activated by the Kunsthaus Graz art educators together with local communities. Anton Kats’s sound piece Kyiv 324, an acoustic psychogeography of radio broadcasts, architecture, traffic, nature and war from Kyiv, will be constantly expanded to include recordings made in Graz, so creating a collective sound experience.

Technical support: Richard Gabriel Gersch
Co-produced by Kunsthaus Graz
Courtesy of the artist

Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński is an artist, writer and scholar. Rooted in Black feminist theory, she has developed a research-based practice with a focus on film and photography, in which she dissects (post-)colonial history and its legacy, dealing with the marginalisation of Black people’s experiences and narratives. In collections and archives she examines power structures and image regimes and especially the gaps in the hegemonic gaze. Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński interlaces the findings of her research with imagination, fiction and an ‘unyielding persistence’ to create critical and poetic works in a ‘deliberately open, at times fragile’ (Nora Sternfeld) form.
 

Commissioned by the 12th Liverpool Biennial, Kazeem-Kamiński developed the video installation Respire, referring to the precariousness of Black existence and how liberation from this is manifested in breathing. This is visualised through participants breathing into a balloon. Their breathing movements and sounds construct a collective space. The sound of breathing moves between the people, from the individual to the collective, into the traumas of the colonial past and back again. The work is accompanied acoustically by the sound artist Bassano Bonelli Bassano and visually by the green (one of the three colours of the Black Consciousness Movement) neon sculpture A Breathing. This is based on a quote from the book Ordinary Notes by author Christina Sharpe, an important reference for the concept of Respire: ‘a multitude of Black persons gathered: a breathing’. In Kazeem-Kamiński’s work, breathing – an essential act of existence – becomes a process of liberation, self-affirmation and the building of a community that insist on their right to history.

Courtesy of the artist

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist working with sound culture, voice, listening and questions of agency. From gestures of intimacy and listening to critical festivity and experimental pedagogy, his practice aligns with a politics and poetics of radical hospitality.
 

Deaf Script is about listening to the deaf voice, which means listening beyond phonocentric understandings of language. LaBelle treats listening as a transformative practice, as active listening, which is not the same as hearing and does not necessarily involve the ear. It also means listening to disabled people, small communities, bodies and non-humans.
 

In a society of global finance capital, where language has become abstract and alienated from us, we need to pay more attention to listening to the body. This is the first step towards healing and solidarity. In this work, listening is reading the Brazilian Sign Language (translated into Portuguese and English subtitles), signs created by the movements of the performers' hands. This work poetically focuses on the sign as a unique linguistic form that keeps language close to the affective potencies of bodily life. From kinaesthetic personification to tactile meaning, Deaf Script invites us to listen through deafness.
 

Developed at Sala 603 Curitiba, Brazil, with deaf performers including Rafaela Hoebel, Gabriela Grigolom Silva, Diegho da Silva Lima, together with Jonatas Medeiros (translation into Brazilian Sign Language) and Giuliano Robert (director of photography).

Directed by Octavio Camargo, Text by Brandon LaBelle.
Courtesy of a private collection

Katalin Ladik describes her cross-media work primarily as poetry. Not as static poems on paper, but rather as dynamised poetry: visual, graphic, in motion. During her performances and photo/video performances, her body and voice become resonating spaces for a social and media critique reflecting on the construction of femininity. Vocally, through facial expressions and gestures together with visual poetry, she explores language as a means of expression and as a powerful tool.
 

The experimental video work O-pus, which Katalin Ladik developed together with Attila Csernik and Imre Póth as the artist collective Bosch+Bosch, marks the beginning of her development of a visual poetry. As a Hungarian Yugoslavian she addressed the challenge of making poetry accessible across language barriers. Parallel to written literature, with this objective she opened up the world of images, collages and sound poetry. The ‘O’ emancipates itself from the paper, onto the hands and feet of the artists and into space, while, intoned by Ladik, it develops an immaterial presence in all its lyrical variations and nuances.
 

Poemim criticises the ideals of female beauty constructed by society and the media – she creates ironic deformations of her own face, her facial features are re-shaped by being pressed against a pane of glass, pulling faces, disguising her voice and emitting incomprehensible noises. Wearing spectacles whose design is a cross between futuristic and carnival costume, her face sprayed with white paint, Ladik heightens the scene into the grotesque. Especially critical of the fashion and beauty industry, she asks what ‘a beautiful woman’s face should look like’.

Slovakian multimedia artist Lucia Nimcová comes from the Ruthenian (Rusyn) ethnic group, a minority living in the eastern Carpathian Mountains of Slovakia, Poland and western Ukraine. The ban on speaking the Ruthenian language during her youth sparked a fascination that she has now been documenting in film and photo projects for over 20 years. In 2014, together with sound artist Sholto Dobie, she began travelling around the Ukrainian part of the Carpathian mountains with the vague aim of creating a Ruthenian folk opera based on the ‘khroniky‘, the narrative songs she knew from her childhood. A special subcategory of these traditional songs are the ‘potka‘ (vagina songs), which are of an explicit nature and contain coded language so that women could communicate secretly in the presence of their husbands.
 

The film Bajka (Fable) and the album DILO (Work) were made over three summers. Unlike conventional documentary practice, Bajka is intended as a subjective synthesis of anthropological research and musical theatre. In this way it undermines the growing appropriation of traditional music and folk culture by populist romantic nationalism – providing instead a stage for narratives that run counter to the dominant narrative, which are often hidden and endangered. Both tragicomic and brutal, the songs deal with domestic violence, sex, love and hatred, presenting an alternative folklore: hard Carpathian rap and vintage feminism. Nimcová and Dobie improvise freely as they move through the streets and fields, kitchens and festivities of the unstable region, blending everyday life and theatre into a polyphonic contemporary chronicle that also shows the immediate presence of the past in the present day.

Courtesy of the artist, Nohami Foundation, Brussels, and Galeria Hlavneho mesta, Bratislava

Sarajevo-born artist Lala Raščić’s performances, installations and drawings explore historical and contemporary practices of storytelling and oral traditions. Her research critically examines folklore and folklorisation as a means of neo-traditionalisation and repatriarchalisation of society. On a material and immaterial level, she seeks to observe the development of traditional forms free of their normative cultural context.
 

POČIMALJA is based on a regional folk music tradition known as ‘tepsijanje’, in which singing is accompanied by a copper pan being spun round by hand. Still practised mainly by women today, the tradition originally came about from necessity – in a deeply patriarchal society, women were typically excluded from making music in public and refused access to musical instruments. By making use of a household object they were able to play an accompaniment to their singing, usually performed at home or on special occasions in public such as weddings. The ‘počimalja’ refers to a woman who often begins a song with a note that is joined in harmony by the other singers, and also hails from folk tradition.
 

In POČIMALJA, Lala Raščić critically examines conventional notions of folklore and reinterprets ‘tepsijanje’ as an expression of suppressed female subjectivity and as a feminist gesture in a patriarchal environment. In this complex immersive installation, she interweaves local traditions with ancient myths and constructs a visually and acoustically poetic narrative about resistance and liberation, an emancipation of tradition itself.
 

Courtesy of the artist

In his work, Antoni Rayzhekov combines aspects of contemporary theatre, performance and music with digital art to create interactive installations that, like performative instruments, make the media and the audience into co-authors and allow them to discover hidden processes and relationships.
 

The Evasive Choir brings together voices from political and public life in Bulgaria since 1989, two years before the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the country’s subsequent independence. Found excerpts from interviews and statements by key political figures of the time can be heard coming from 30 open tin cans, all playing simultaneously like the hubbub of voices in a public – political – square, a polyphonic conversation, a choir. The artist has, however, edited the interviews to remove all of the spoken words and kept in only the sounds surrounding them: gasps, sighs, unarticulated sounds of unease, hesitation and silence. We usually associate the voice with language and communication – and yet in Rayzhekov’s installation we encounter it somewhere beyond language and discover the unspoken, the unspeakable, the silenced. In the transition to silence there is a tangible sense of indecision, of uncertainty.
 

Composed from the voices of politicians who have shaped and determined Bulgarian political life in various changing positions over the years and even decades, The Evasive Choir examines the state of society in the country – an inherited collective silence, the weakness of the public media, the difficulty in establishing and maintaining democratic processes. Antoni Rayzhekov’s political analysis of his home country’s recent past can be read today as a cautionary commentary on the present situation in almost all of Europe

* 30-channel sound installation; found interview recordings of Bulgarian politicians from 1989 – 2020, metal note stands, tin cans, speakers, electronics, variable dimensions
Courtesy of National Gallery Sofia

Gerhard Rühm is a graphic artist, painter and collagist, a dramatist, performer and poet, composer, musician and interpretive artist. On the borders of traditional genres, his work begins with the lyrical and the musical; he probes their expansion in the heightening of expression through the reduction of means. In his visual compositions he removes language from its customary contexts and conventions, using it as material. He was among the first to merge music, literature and visual art into a poetic synthesis.
 

Rühm’s typocollages broaden and hone the expressive repertoire of his earlier typewriter ideograms in that they use the potential for different font sizes and types and are independent of the format of the typewriter sheet. While the appeal of typewriter poetry can also result from the creative use of its technological constraints, the visual poetry of typocollages displays a greater freedom. In the spirit of concrete poetry, words and individual letters are employed very sparingly. There is some variation in what Rühm defines for the viewer: from the suggested reading direction of Lippen und Lippen, which fills the sheet to its edges, to the central triangular relationship of Der Weg Haut! Haut through to smooth Fall, highly dynamised by a further graphic element and differences in size.
 

Both in semantic and visual terms, the individual words are presented in a delicately balanced state of suspension – unrestricted by the context of a sentence, they can ‘fully develop their aura of meaning’ (Gerhard Rühm) and form visual constellations that we approach at first from a pictorial and then an acoustic perspective, finally making our own connections.

Courtesy of Neue Galerie Graz, UMJ, Gerhard Rühm donation

The work of Selma Selman, who originates from Ružica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, arises from her personal biography as an artist with a Roma background. Based on her experiences and identity she has developed a socially and politically engaged practice that explores themes such as multiple discrimination, feminist self-empowerment and political resistance.
 

You Have No Idea is a highly personal, intense performance created by Selman in 2016 and staged several times since. She directly confronts the audience while continuously repeating the phrase ‘You Have No Idea’. In this performance she walks along Black Lives Matter Boulevard towards the White House on the day of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. She begins by speaking in a controlled way, then screams, whispers and sobs the same sentence over and over again to the point of physical exhaustion: ‘You have no idea.’ – As the artist herself describes: ‘You have no idea about my life as a whole. You do not know who I am, nor do you know my happiness or my sadness. You do not know about the presence or absence of pain in my life, nor how I feel at the moment that I perform this piece to a live audience. You have no idea.’
 

On the boundary between vulnerability and violence, Selma Selman opposes and rejects racist, sexist and other labels. As a woman and as a Romnja, her voice produces a sense of disorientation in its loudness.
 

The people following her performance with their gazes, cameras and cell phones react emotionally – fascinated, unsettled, angry. Although caught in this limbo between rage and despair, resistance and (self-) protection, Selman affirms the power of empathy while also asking the question of whether it is fit to serve as a foundation for social or political movements.

Video: Cesar Hatum
Courtesy of the artist

NONpractical Women collective was founded in 2000 by ŠKART group, in collaboration with Single Mothers Refuge Group WOMAN, Zemun, Serbia.
 

ŠKART group (founded by Djordje Balmazović and Dragan Protić) examines and combines border forms of poetry, graphic design, alternative education and social activism through constant constructive conflict.
 

In the early 2000s, ŠKART gave a voice to single mothers by inviting them to create kuvarice (new cooks) using a traditional skill – embroidery. Kuvarice are cloths that until not that long ago were to be found hanging over the stove in every home. They were embroidered by housewives with short phrases expressing a wife's submission to her husband and her concern for his stomach.
 

Instead of these submissive expressions of love, ŠKART commissioned single women to embroider socially critical texts on the cloths. The idea was not only to raise awareness among the women, but also to help them survive. From the beginning, ŠKART has sold the kuvarice and donated the proceeds to the embroiderers. 
 

With the kuvarice, ŠKART has become a platform for all those who want to become poets or try their hand at art in other ways. They include illustrated rhyming texts about politics, domestic violence, children's rights, neighbourhood habits, ecology and chronicles, and have encouraged and surprised many others, inspiring them to express their feelings, struggles and problems in their own way.
 

The kitchen wisdom of non-practitioners Lenka Zelenović, Brigita Medjo & Vladan Nikolić and Pava Martinović tells their stories and reminds us that every skill is useful and every resistance counts.
Lyrics, drawings, embroideries: NONpractical Women,
Initiative & production: ŠKART
Courtesy of a private collection

Mladen Stilinović's work relates to the ideological, economic and everyday context of the former Yugoslavia and Croatia. His interest centres on language, political slogans, media manipulation, street design and people's speech, playing with the 'exploitation' of language to open up new visual and poetic dimensions.
 

Početnica 1, 2, 3 / Primer 1, 2, 3 is a trilogy of short silent films that begins by asking viewers to read aloud the texts that follow. The first part presents signboards from a hairdressing salon, locksmith, cooper, carpentry and other shops – from numbers 57 to 67 on Vlaška Street, Zagreb. Here Stilinović opens up an area of ​​his interest in street design, which arises spontaneously, created by ʹsignwritersʹ, people without professional knowledge. Stilinović loved this kind of design: two of the books (leporello) he created in 1975 were dedicated to hairdressers and photography workshops.

In the second part, entitled The Reader, the function of the picture is completely taken over by the words and letters from Stilinović's poem, arranged so that there is one word in each frame. As the word is read faster than the length of the frame, the relation with the word read previously is lost, and in the end the meaning of this otherwise simple poem disappears. By montage fragmentation to the point of meaninglessness, the author tries to destroy the effectiveness of words with film time.
 

The final part, the Picture Book, once again addresses the viewers in large printed letters, now with a request to read aloud both the text and the pictures, which should ultimately fit into the story of Aesop's fable about the lioness and the fox, with an unequivocal lesson (Value is not in quantity, but in excellence!).
 

As in much of his oeuvre, in Pjevaj! / Sing! Mladen Stilinović addresses the theme of work and money. In his own words: ‘I stuck money on my own forehead and told myself to sing. It's self-ironic, but I'd also like to earn some money. It was a joke, but not intentional. It did not matter that it was directed at me. You have to sing what others tell you to sing, if they pay you.’
 

In a highly performative gesture, a 100 Yugoslav dinar note is pasted on the artist's forehead with the words ʹPjevaj! (Sing!)ʹ. The image refers to the Balkan tradition of paying for singers in bars by taping a banknote to their foreheads. Beyond the tradition the work highlights the position of the artist, never adequately paid or respected.

Irena Z. Tomažin works as a performer and creator in dance theatre, contemporary performance and experimental improvised music, in the field of sonority and noise, the interplay of the voice, the body and the sound of its mechanics. Her voice is always located in the spaces to which it belongs and which have shaped it, and in the different times that are present in her work.
 

Her new sound installation Whispering Walls evokes associations with physical and mental walls in and around Europe, where wars rage and people flee. These are the walls that separate the 'cultural' world from the 'barbaric'. Whispering Walls refers to the Serbian epic poem The Walling of the Skadar, which dates back to the 14th century, the time of the Ottoman conquest of Serbia, and tells of the building of a fortress on the Bojana River. At that time it was believed that no great building could be built without sacrifice, and so it was that one of the Serbian nobles had to have his wife walled up alive inside the fortress. Jacob Grimm called it one of the most moving poems of the time and sent it to Goethe, who was horrified by the barbarity of the motif and the superstition.
 

Whispering Walls draws attention to the barbarism currently occurring in and around Europe. The wall emits three sonic narratives, heard through three slits in the wall: the voices of the body, testifying to the physical presence of the body that we usually aim to cultivate; tragic folk songs from the Balkans; and a reading of the archive of censored or silenced voices in contemporary Europe.
 

It combines the emotional, physical and rational mechanisms of triggering or silencing the voices of our modern world.

Sound edit & mix: Tomaž Grom
Wall design: studio-itzo
Co-produced by Kunsthaus Graz
Courtesy of the artist

The practice of Nora Turato has continually interrogated our collective relationship to language and expression through her wide-ranging work in performance, installation and artist publications, amongst other media. Her monologues have dissected the cacophony of the internet, channelled dubious salesmen and delved into the anxious underbelly of the wellness industry. Turato’s voice acts as the instrument conveying the alarming excess of information and fabrications we are subjected to on a near constant basis.
 

At Kunsthaus Graz, Turato’s newly commissioned audio piece dispenses with prior scripted formats and focuses on visceral forms of expression. my first A examines communication – emotional and physical – from the body. Turato records herself literally verbalising the letter ‘A’. With her throat fully open the effort of release is palpable, heard through the audio as she draws air. Turato likens it to her first genuine expression of the vowel (hence the title). Incorporating elements from the Vocal Freedom method, Turato's voice performs the sound in direct opposition to neuromuscular tensions built from birth, restricting our expressions. By emphasising primal release, Turato undoes conditioned habits of speaking – by definition a pattern – and aims to reveal the uninhibited voice of our bodies.
 

The location of Turato’s sound piece along the Kunsthaus ‘Travelator’ makes a deliberate comparison to the throat, both in the colour chosen and the feature’s current length. For the duration of the ride upwards, the viewer follows the ‘A’ steadily finding its way out for release. The atypical architecture itself is positioned as a body-like form. Turato draws these connections with her consideration of how the sound inhabits the space, embodying the voice of this unusual and singular structure.

Co-produced by Kunsthaus Graz
Courtesy of the artist

Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec is an artist and researcher with a particular focus on sound, new media, real-time interaction and questions of contemporary mediation in relation to the sense of (bodily) presence. His works address visitors through sound, tactility, kinetic movement and vibration to question how human bodily presence can be felt and sensed beyond direct visuality and vicinity.
 

The Landscape of the Passerby captures and explores the moment of a random encounter between an insect, a printed text and a reader’s gaze. An insect lands on a newspaper page and meanders across it. Its presence refocuses the reader’s attention from the text to the insect’s path, which he follows with a mobile phone camera. Later, the reader tries to draw the path of the insect by looking at the video and tracing the insect’s path with a pen on a blank paper several times. The installation consists of a video projection of the video recording and a cabinet displaying four drawings and the newspaper.
Rather than trying to understand or represent the relation between the insect and the text, the reader makes himself available to the insect, by giving it intimate attention and following it. He persists in a suspended relation of being-with the incomprehensible other as an act of radical listening. In doing so, he grants presence to this more-than-human organism that is meandering through a landscape, which, to the human gaze, appears as a readable text. By blissfully realising the impossibility of fully grasping the relations between the insect, the text and himself, the reader embraces and celebrates this moment of passing by as a creative act that does not originate from (his) singular individuality, desire and intention, but rather emerges from the encounter of incompatible subjectivities, meanings and attentions.
 

Courtesy of the artist