BOX WITH THE SOUND
OF ITS OWN MAKING
EPISODE III
06.12.-17.12.2017

Opening program:
December 6, 18.30 – 23.00

18.30: Introduction to the program by Mihnea Mircan

18.45 – 19.30: speaking as a woman as a dog,
lecture-performance by Sarah Browne
20.00 – 22.00: Screening of the third episode of the film program > Simon Dybbroe Møller, Animate V / Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Rubber Coated Steel / Bedwyr Williams, Hotel 70° / Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, The Unmanned – 1759 – Mille Trois Cens Quarante Huyt / Bedwyr Williams, Flexure / Laure Prouvost, Lick in the Past / Pauline Curnier Jardin, Explosion Ma Baby

22.00 – 23.00: Drinks

The third episode of Box with the Sound of Its Own Making debuts on 6 December with a lecture-performance by Irish artist Sarah Browne, whose film Report to an Academy was included in the second screening program (running through December 3). Titled speaking as a woman as a dog, the lecture examines some of the difficulties and dangers of articulating speech through the body in legal and medical environments. A key departure point for this lecture is a libel case in England in the early 1900s, arising from clashing interests of the medical establishment and two Swedish physiology students who were also anti-vivisection activists. Picking through history by focusing on certain marginal episodes, Browne illuminates powerful affinities that can arise between unspeaking or silenced bodies.

The last segment of the film program includes seven case studies of resonance, actual or symbolic echo chambers whose external separations or interior folds are examined and vibrated, actualizing the possibility contained in the title of the project across a variety of regimes of experience. These systems of acoustic or metaphorical reverberation range from relatively straightforward ‘boxes’ such as a car or a room, looking at bodies or selves that aspire to ‘fit’ in the spaces and precepts of design or architecture, to the confines of disciplines as theoretical edifices and sets of practical applications, to ritual spaces or environments mythologized in popular culture. Simon Dybbroe Møller rehearses a dizzying variety of advertising tropes that accumulate in poetically contradictory descriptions of the same object; Lawrence Abu Hamdan stages a forensic investigation with the oppressive enclosure of a shooting range; Bedwyr Williams’ two films narrate fables of bodies attempting to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of architecture or maintain a space for themselves in spite of the nuisances – presented here hyperbolically – of communal living, while Laure Prouvost’s adolescent protagonists echo in their behavior the metamorphic mindset of their city, Los Angeles, so that their autobiographical account is shot through with flashes of transgressive desire and the vocalizations of an impersonal id.

Photo: P. Bedford, Royal Veterinary College, courtesy of Wellcome Trust


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

More info on the exhibition, the second episode of the film program and Erik Bünger's lecture-performance here


-----

Box with the Sound of Its Own Making

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

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

Films by: 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

Curator: Mihnea Mircan

November 8, 2017 – January 28, 2018