Tag: installation

A slightly curving place

Curated by Nida Ghouse, this work is a 120 minute ambisonic piece created in 2019. It deals with the archeology of a site through its sounds. The piece was comprised of sound artworks from seven different sound artists, and rendered to the auditorium by two sound artists and myself. A group of set designers built an environment that reacted to visual shifts in the room. The created space had a symbolic altitude and functioned as a disguised seating arena.

I found great possibility in taking directional input primarily from sound, and reacting to that with a number of LED tiles, limited to warm and cold white light. I worked intuitively based on a setup of haptic tools, fed back to the lighting system of the museum. The LED tiles being the primary light source to the space, the only outstanding visual impulse and one
of the dominant media perceptible in the room, there was much space to play. 

The palette was perceived broader than it was, as I could address all tiles individually. All relative values of hues and saturation was perceived as an unique color palette supported with only a small number of special lights in the room. The spatial rendering of sound and light made the room animated, and gave the audio piece a new incentive.

My work has been generously technically supported by Eduardo Abdala.

Photo: Laura Fiorio

 

contributors and in collaboration with Umashankar Manthravadi, Bani Abidi, Mojisola Adebayo, Vinit Agarwal, Sukhesh Arora, Anurima Banerji, Lilia Di Bella, Moushumi Bhowmik, Madhuri Chattopadyay, Padmini Chettur, Arunima Chowdhury, Emese Csornai, Padma Damodaran, Hugo Esquinca, Jenifer Evans, Eunice Fong, Tyler Friedman, Janardan Ghosh, Brooke Holmes, Alexander Keefe, Sukanta Majumdar, Robert Millis, Farah Mulla, Rita Sonal Panjatan, Ayaz Pasha, TJ Rehmi, RENU, Uzma Z. Rizvi, Sara, Yashas Shetty, The Travelling Archive, Maarten Visser and others.

Video excerpt:


One Hundred More

Rooted in friendship and alliance, One hundred
more is co-authored by Laurie Young and Justine
A. Chambers, and created in collaboration with
Emese Csornai, Neda Sanai and Sarah Doucet.
On tour music has been performed by Vic
Cheong. This work is urgently informed by our
current socio-political climate, which has
produced an ever-greater groundswell of
racialized bodies resisting, moving in collective
anger, revolt and counter-resistance, captured
and replayed in an endless torrent of images.
Through incremental and iterative actions, an
iconic gesture of political resistance becomes the
site to house quotidian physical strategies for
resistance as embodied by two women of colour.
The gestural vocabulary of this work is
simultaneously archival and emergent allowing
the notion of the minor gesture, as articulated by
Erin Manning, to inform action
and structure.


“The major is a structural tendency that
organizes itself according to predetermined
definitions of value. The minor is a force that
courses through it, unmorring its structural
integrity, problematizing its normative
standards”. (Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture)

Through the emergence of the minor gesture
from rhythmic repetition, Young and Chambers
invoke the illegible and in the words of Edouard
Glissant, “ the right to opacity”.


On a conceptual level of lighting this
performance, I am playing on the ideas of
neutralizing, empowering and overpowering,
making the skin tone of the performers more
or less apparent at different times, making
white as a reference less and less readable.
I go along with rhythm at times and not at
others, guiding the audience perception to
question togetherness, question the obvious,
subliminally touch upon different imprints of
perception relating to color, and touch upon
racial profiling in a less conscious process.

Justine A. Chambers was featured artist with both the performative and video installation version of this work at the Toronto Biennial of Arts in 2024

https://torontobiennial.org/exhibition/one-hundred-more

Full documentation

CREDITS

Concept, Choreography, Performance: Justine A. Chambers and Laurie Young

Composition, Sound design: Neda Sanai, later Vic Cheong

Costume Design, Rehearsal Direction & Dramaturgy: Sarah Doucet

Lighting design: Emese Csornai

Artistic Support : Josh Hite

Outside Eye: Sergiu Matis

Production: M.I.C.A. – Movement in contemporary art

Thank you: Bruno Pocheron, Kemi Craig, Lee Su-Feh

A PRODUCTION BY LAURIE YOUNG + JUSTINE A. CHAMBERS in co-production with the Visiting Dance Artist Program, a joint initiative of the National Arts Centre and the Canada Council for the Arts, Agora de la Danse – Montreal, and SOPHIENSÆLE.

Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, the Canada Council for the Arts, Dance Victoria’s Chrystal Dance Prize, British Columbia Arts Council and the Goethe – Institut.
MEDIA PARTNER: Taz. die Tageszeitung 


Photography by Josh Hite, 2019, Berlin and still from video documentation Toronto Biennial of Arts 2024