BOX WITH THE SOUND
OF ITS OWN MAKING
EPISODE II
22.11.-03.12.2017

Opening program:
November 22, 18.00 – 23.00

18.00: Introduction to the program by Mihnea Mircan

18.15 – 19.30: The Girl Who Never Was,
lecture-performance by Erik Bünger

20.00 – 22.00: Screening of the second episode of the film program > Anja Kirschner & David Panos, Ultimate Substance / Phillip Warnell, Ming of Harlem (fragment) / Sarah Browne, Report to an Academy / Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, The Unmanned – 1834 – Mass Memory / Anri Sala, Long Sorrow / Simon Dybbroe Møller, The Plain

22.00 – 23.00: Drinks

The second episode of Box with the Sound of Its Own Making debuts on November 22 with a lecture-performance by Swedish artist Erik Bünger. Titled The Girl Who Never Was, the lecture follows some of the narrative and conceptual threads announced in A Lecture on Schizophonia, the artist’s video included in the first segment of the film selection, screened until November 19. The Girl Who Never Was takes as point of departure the discovery, in 2008, of “the first recorded voice ever:” the 148-year old voice of a little girl singing the lullaby Au clair de la lune. One year later, another researcher experiments with the playback speed and determines that the recorded voice is in fact that of an adult man. This same lullaby is sung by the computer HAL 9000 in the French version of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey. That inhuman tone performs precisely the same glissando as the voice of the non-existent girl: a high-strung, persevering voice is gradually slowed down into a deep, sleepy intonation. Erik Bünger's lecture-performance takes a detour through history, pursuing the voice of a child as it echoes forwards and backwards through time.

The second part of the film program, which will be screened until December 3, includes six videos that discuss different cases of ‘the limit’, figures and crises of the liminal as they manifest between spheres of materiality and abstract operation, ongoing political realities and the mythological foundations of community, between human and animal environments, behaviors and speech acts, or between the distinct planes of experience in our encounter with art, where critical discourse imagines thresholds of transcendence or sublimation. Anja Kirschner and David Panos narrate the ongoing Greek crisis as a polemic between the darkness of the mining pit where actual slaves toil and its allegorical correspondent, populated by metaphorical avatars, in Plato’s account of intellectual emancipation. Sarah Browne (whose performance will inaugurate the third episode of the program on December 6) and Phillip Warnell chart the divide between human, animal and robotic voices as a porous border, where each can become the other, usurp the other’s position or function as the other’s translation. Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni revisit the scene of the 1834 Lyon riots against the introduction of the Jacquard loom, a precursor of the computation of labor; Anri Sala displaces the protagonist of his film in relation to a type of modern architecture predicated precisely on displacement, and Simon Dybbroe Møller weaves a story that confuses the reality of the canvas and that of the screen on which his film is projected.

More info on the exhibition, the first episode of the film program and Ho Rui An's lecture-performance here

The last episode of the screening program is scheduled to start on December 6 with a lecture-performance by Sarah Browne.

Image: Erik Bünger, The Girl Who Never Was (photo: Bartosz-Górka)


-----

Box with the Sound of Its Own Making

Works by: Geert Goiris, Susanne Kriemann, Fabio Mauri, Philip Metten, Phillip Warnell

Lecture-performances: Sarah Browne, Erik Bünger, Ho Rui An

Films de: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Sarah Browne, Erik Bünger, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Josef Dabernig, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Anja Kirschner & David Panos, Daria Martin, Laure Prouvost, Anri Sala, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Phillip Warnell, Bedwyr Williams, John Williamson

Curated by: Mihnea Mircan

November 8 2017 – January 28 2018