Click on image for slide show.

Symposium in which speakers Anne Hilde Neset, Deputy Editor of The Wire, and the writer, composer, sound artist and broadcaster Robert Worby were invited to address issues of sonic practice raised by the exhibition Noise Control.

The symposium, which took place at Donlon Books next door to IMT, also gave visitors the chance to speak directly to the artists about their work.

Click on image for slide show.

Performance Evening: Thursday 3 December 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Symposium: Saturday 5 December 3:00 - 6:00 pm

An exhibition of new works by eight sound artists, Noise Control addressed the manner in which we deal with the subtle balance between different concepts of noise and how it undergoes transformation in the arts.

There exist vastly differing interpretations of what constitutes ‘noise’, and the exhibition demonstrated how the artistic control of noise lies at the very heart of artistic practices, whether they be music, installation, film, or performance. Noise Control presented work by Antoine Bertin, Haris Custovic, Karl Gibson, Victoria Karlsson, Matthias Kassmannhuber, Zuzana Novak, Alex Paschali and Marco Schilling.

Some of the artists in the exhibition use noise as the medium to reveal sonic properties: Custovic’s video work examining the facial expressions in reaction to unfamiliar sounds, or Schilling’s shaping of background noise to explore the boundaries where noise and music overlap. Karlsson addresses the transformation of sounds to and from language, and how the inconsistent nature of verbal communication incorporates shifts of meaning and interpretation that oscillate between signification and noise.

Other works show how noise can be shaped by our environment. Kassmannhuber’s site-specific installation demonstrates how audio feedback can be controlled through the manipulation of its trajectory through space, whilst Paschali explores the near-mythologising of the notion of resonant frequencies and Bertin’s sonic “explorations” document sounds from spaces just outside of our reach.

Other artists deal with more socio-cultural definitions of noise. Novak explores the voices of London’s homeless population, her work revealing how these voices, overlooked or ignored by mainstream society, occupy and shape our concepts of social space. Gibson is concerned with the origins of the customs and traditions of Hip-Hop and whether they have been misappropriated as Hip-Hop culture is absorbed into the mainstream.

Noise Control was curated by Joel Cahen and Mark Jackson, IMT’s project co-ordinator. Cahen practices in sound, video and improvisation. He creates sound for films and dance productions and plays on a weekly radio show on Resonance FM called Soundsoup. Together with sound artist Wajid Yaseen of Uniform, Cahen created Scrap Club, a public destructivist activity. In 2008 Cahen created the touring underwater sound art gallery Wet Sounds.

Noise Control was an exhibition and symposium presenting the final work of eight MA Sound Arts graduates of London College of Communication. The groundbreaking work in the exhibition demonstrated the high level of critical debate in sonic disciplines fostered by the university’s Department of Sound Art and Design since 1998.

Still from ‘Stiletto’ by Adam Roberts

The third in the ‘Filmarmalade Presents Lil Joe’s, 9/11, Porn, Yanks and Murder…’ series of artist film and video screenings at IMT.

Adam Roberts’ ‘Stiletto’, enacts a few moments in the life of a young orphaned boy who restlessly wiles away the time in the suburban idyll of his aunt’s unloving home. Haunted by self-doubt and loathing for all that surrounds him, he creates through a series of ritualistic offerings, an animal deity, which he keeps caged in a shed at the bottom of the garden and whose existence ultimately leads to a horrific finale.

The screening also includes an interview, specially commissioned with Adam Roberts at Gordon Shrigley’s studio with Miranda Pennell and Jonathan Romney.

Still from ‘An Interview with Adam Roberts’ by Gordon Shrigley

Adam Roberts’ recently screened work at Performatica, Mexico, the Zodiak Festival, Helsinki, the Point, Eastleigh, The Filmhuis, Den Haag and at Todds Gallery, Hastings. He was born in Colombia and lives and works in London.

Filmarmalade is an artist run project established to publish on DVD selected artists’ films and video works, so as to encourage a wider access to the moving image and to allow a greater understanding, through specially commissioned interviews of how each artist situates their work, in relation to the history of art and contemporary fine art practice.

A limited edition DVD of Adam Roberts ‘Stiletto’, published by Filmarmalade will be available to buy on the night for £12.99

filmarmalade.co.uk

Marmalade and Filmarmalade are not simply an artists’ book and artists film and video publishing platform, but projects that, like IMT’s, aim to inspire debate around issues integral to contemporary arts practice.

Gordon Shrigley on Marmalade & Filmarmalade:

“Sometime after finishing the work Insignificance around 2000, I’d been working on a series of drawings that explored the idea that somehow line underpins consciousness and wanted to start to think further about why lineature, although it occupies a central role within artistic practice and human culture more generally, nevertheless remains largely unacknowledged.

“And so i started Marmalade as a vehicle to try and understand how line forms the basis for a wide variety of disciplines, but also as a space, a loose clearing if you like, for an intimate conversation between artists to talk about what they have come to see and understand about their chosen medium.

“So when I decided to broaden the scope of the project by publishing artists’ film and video as well as bookworks, the theme of an artists’ relation to medium was extended into the form of filmed interviews, to accompany the film works. And again, to progress the idea of an intimate conversation, I constructed the interviews to be as open as possible, simply the length of an HDV tape with little editing, as a way of recording the space created by the artist, their language, terms of reference, gestures and sense of commitment to practice.

“I would say then, that the Marmalade and Filmarmalade projects are both a way of distributing art through bookworks and DVD’s to a wider audience, but also as a tactic to create a series of wandering conversations around the question of whether there is a form of knowledge available to artists’ alone, that emerges through the discipline of working with a particular medium over time. And if we can agree that this is at the very least an intriguing possibility, how might we come to speak about this arcane form of knowledge, which appears to exist outside of the accepted vicissitudes of what we understand as art history?”

Gordon Shrigley - September 2009

The next event at IMT will be a screening of ‘Stiletto’ by Adam Roberts on 12 November at 18:00 as part of Filmarmalade Presents Lil Joe’s, 911, Porn, Yanks and Murder…

Filmarmalade Presents Lil Joe’s, 9/11, Porn, Yanks and Murder…

‘Stiletto’ by Adam Roberts
‘Preemptive Disappearance’ by Francisca Benitez
‘Invitation to a Peaceful City’ - Kelvin Kyung Kun Park

Filmarmalade

Click on image for slide show.

To accompany the exhibition Songbook, IMT hosted an artists’ talk with Polish artist and composer Wojciech Kosma on Saturday 19 September from 18:00 - 21:00. Through the talk Roger Redgate, composer and Head of Compoosition at Goldsmiths College, and Mark Jackson, Project Co-ordinator at IMT, discussed with Kosma the motivations behind Songbook, and issues raised by the work in the exhibition.

Songbook is an exhibition of cutting edge sound art by Polish artist and composer Wojciech Kosma, in which art, artist and audience intersect.

Wojciech Kosma lives between Berlin and London, working between art and composition. His compositions have been performed widely, most recently at Light Industry, New York, at Goldsmiths University in London, in the Chilean Embassy in Paris and in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. His works were also recently exhibited in Lyst in Overgaden in Copenhagen, The Real Thing in MU Eindhoven, Club Transmediale, CCA Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2007 he established the Wrong Ensemble who performed at IMT in 2008.

Wojciech Kosma – Songbook was curated by Pawel Kaminski of IMT, and supported by the Arts Council England and the Polish Cultural Institute.

Click on image for slide show.

An exhibition of cutting edge musical compositions by Polish artist Wojciech Kosma, in which art, artist and audience intersect. In autumn 2009 IMT hosted an interactive exhibition of Kosma’s scores, directions for musical pieces and art works, the majority of which had never been published or performed before.

Many of Kosma’s compositions use radical or bizarre methods of working with music and its relationship to the human body and ask alternately for specific forms of human interaction or endurance. His poetic and conceptual scores and performances combine elements of psychology and physiology, but also pornography, logic and irony, with traditional musical notation.

In Songbook the idea of the audience as performer sits at the heart of Kosma’s thoughts about art and music in his belief that to really hear a piece of music one must attempt to play it. Visitors to the exhibition were given opportunities to perform Kosma’s scores, alongside video performances of some of his works by Jeki Zaborov. Performances from Songbook, and other works, are online here and are updated as his project continues.

Wojciech Kosma lives between Berlin and London, working between art and composition. His compositions have been performed widely, most recently at Light Industry, New York, at Goldsmiths University in London, in the Chilean Embassy in Paris and in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. His works were also recently exhibited in Lyst in Overgaden in Copenhagen, The Real Thing in MU Eindhoven, Club Transmediale, CCA Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2007 he established the Wrong Ensemble who performed at IMT in 2008.

Wojciech Kosma – Songbook was curated by Pawel Kaminski of IMT, and supported by the Arts Council England and the Polish Cultural Institute.