More exciting Biennial news (includes Imogen Stidworthy (Liverpool Art Prize Winner 2008), Phil Jeck from SoundNetwork and Juan Cruz, Professor at Liverpool Academy of Art & Design) …
No Longer Empty Comes to Liverpool Biennial
The New York-based group No Longer Empty (NLE) is proud to announce its participation in the 2010 International Festival of Contemporary Art in Liverpool, England. Exhibiting at the Liverpool Biennial from September 17th–November 27th,, NLE will continue its tradition of exploring the aesthetics of empty spaces as one of the Biennials’ six official programs.
Conceived as a response to the present economic condition, No Longer Empty creates site-specific installations that temporarily transform vacant venues throughout the city. For Liverpool, NLE exhibition has been curated and produced by Asher Remy-Toledo— co-founder of NLE—it will feature thirteen international and local artists who use sound as a medium to explore the history of the city. N.L.E. will collaborate with T.A.O. (and arts group that provides spaces for artist) and FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology- in Liverpool) in order to create a larger impact in the urban and social regeneration of the area. This event in Liverpool will launch NLE on the Road as it will continue opening new markets internationally.
Clemencia Echeverri: Voz. This video project works with sounds that exist within prisons. The artist evokes the idea that the voices are the inner core of the body, and yet they are detached from the prisoners, eliminating any sense of identity and reinforcing the forgotten people within the building.
Giuseppe Stampone: Play is five custom-made sound installation coffins inside a large mausoleum inspired by the countries that have played an important role in the collapse of the world economy.
Imogen Stidworthy: By Ours is a sound project created by the artist as a response to Liverpool’s traumatic relationship with housing demolition, the flawed relocation policies implemented in a city marked by economic inequality and all the psychological, physical and social echoes it engenders.
Jani Ruscica: Beatbox video portrays sound and movement as self-expressive navigational tools. Filmed in NYC, hip-hop artists and beatboxers interprete and imitate the sounds of their surroundings.
Joe Diebes: Scherzo is a music film that explores the limits of human virtuosity and the convergence of human and machine. The virtuoso’s desire to achieve machine-like speed and perfection is realized in both exhilarating and disturbing dimensions as his performance is fragmented and recombined into an impossibly extended musical climax.
Juan Cruz: This artist is mostly known for using translation as a means of constructing identity. Cruz challenges our concept of what it means to listen by using resources other than sound to tell a story.
Marina Rosenfeld‘s P.A. will use the complex overhead airspace and daily function of Liverpool’s historic Renshaw Hall, now a car park, as both a reflecting and distorting structure for sound. Visitors to the site will encounter several massive loudspeakers installed overhead, sweeping the architecture and transient residents of the space– both human and vehicular– with the artist’s musical deployment of fragments of speech and pre-recorded sound.
Mayke Nas and Wouter Snoei: I Delayed People’s Flights By Walking Slowly In Narrow Hallways. Percussion group SDH uses sound enhanced blackboards to create a meeting point between composed music and image, with the audience completing the collaboration, resulting in a new musical composition.
Miguel Angel Rios: Opus320419311905911317116 is a film with very careful ‘mise en scène’ and a very dense physical presence. It can be considered a requiem to violence of our days in general, but subtly hints at New York, Madrid, London, and other places of acts of terrorism.
Phil Jeck: Pool of Voices takes old records and turntables salvaged from junk shops, playing them as musical instruments. The music, which is a combination of spoken word and synthetic sounds, is a uniquely original creation, moving beyond the gimmick to compositions that are music in their own right.
Ray Lee: Murmur is a site-specific sound installation that explores the invisible phenomena of this particular empty space. His large installation “Siren” won five stars at the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Ted Riederer Never Records is an artwork that resembles a functioning record store rather than an art installation. It is a continuation of a project with No Longer Empty, which made its debut in January 2010 in an abandoned Tower Records store in New York City.
Please visit the website (www.nolongerempty.org) to learn more about NLE’s ongoing projects.