Sonic Faction presents an occasion for immersive collective listening. A programme of three diverse ‘audio essays’ by Kode9, Justin Barton and Mark Fisher, and Robin Mackay invites listeners to experience the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought.
Kode9’s Astro-Darien (2022) is a sonic fiction about simulation, presenting an alternative history of the Scottish Space Programme, haunted by the ghosts of the British Empire. Justin Barton and Mark Fisher’s On Vanishing Land (2006) is a dreamlike account of a coastal walk that expands into questions of modernity, capitalism, fiction, and the micropolitics of escape. Robin Mackay’s By the North Sea (2021) is a meditation on time, disappearance and loss as heard through the fictions of Lovecraft, Ccru, and the spectre of Dunwich, the city that vanished beneath the waves.
For the opening event, all three artists will join the audience at KARST to discuss the potential of the audio essay as a medium and method that intensifies listening and unsettles the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, field recording, radio play….
The audio essays will play in the gallery space at KARST during the following week, in an installation including additional audio archives and related materials.
Click here to book your tickets.
In association with Urbanomic and Hyperdub.
Hardeep Pandhal’s luridly iconoclastic digital animations, drawings, textile work and multimedia installations confront the toxic legacies of empire. His art makes direct reference to his Sikh heritage and to the many types of racism that he has experienced. Layered narratives – delivered via rap and elliptical wordplay, comics and video games – excavate tangled histories of post-colonialism and misogyny, reflecting what he calls the ‘exaggerated madness’ of real life.
Hardeep Pandhal (born 1985, Birmingham) lives and works in Glasgow. Pandhal studied at Leeds Metropolitan University and The Glasgow School of Art.
Free admission. Book your ticket here.
Mandy El-Sayegh uses latex as a skin to bind, protect and encase paintings, works on paper and installations, and as a solid material for sculptures. A familiar product from her Malaysian birthplace, latex holds El-Sayegh’s collaged fragments together in a coagulated form. Plundering her personal archive of ephemera and hoarded scraps, she layers newspapers, maps, drawings, sweet wrappers, photographs and Arabic and Chinese calligraphy. Grids also recur throughout her work, not least the newspaper sheets used to paper KARST’s floor and walls.
Mandy El-Sayegh (born 1985, Selangor, Malaysia) lives and works in London. El-Sayegh studied at the University of Westminster and the Royal College of Art, both London
Free admission. Book your ticket here.
Come and join us at KARST for the Big Draw event on Friday 28 October 11-5pm. The Big Draw event at KARST will explore movement, migration, markers of time and collaboration. Be part of our large-scale collaborative drawing and make your mark. You will be using body attachments made by two of our studio artists Anna Boland and Laura Robertson.
The Big Draw is a chance to try something new, have some fun and experiment. You’re invited to draw, make your mark and to test and explore drawing in new ways using our drawing machine and attachments. You can work both individually or collaboratively and you can draw with your family or friends. Open and accessible to all ages or abilities, no previous experience is required. Throughout the day we will be working on a large, 10 metre long drawing to create a series of layered pieces.
It’s a drop in event so you can stay as long as you like.
Funder and Sponsor credit: KARST, Hayward Gallery Touring, Southbank Centre, Arts Council England, The Box, Arts University Plymouth, University of Plymouth, Plymouth City Council, Plymouth Culture.
Starting at KARST in Stonehouse, before moving on to MIRROR, The Levinsky Gallery and The Box near the city centre, join the curators of the British Art Show 9 exhibition, Irene Aristizabal and Hammad Nasar, for an exclusive highlights tour. Transport will be provided from KARST.
Free admission. Booking essential. (now fully booked)
No Soap Radio (NSR) is a street photography collective created by a group of friends to share analogue photos of the oddities they encounter daily. The images have no consistent theme, planning, or any order at all: they are purely opportunistic. The thread that draws the group together is skateboarding in Plymouth but NSR looks beyond that to places and characters encountered along the way.
This live event from 5-9pm includes a skate jam and DJ set. Free entry.
A panel discussion with Ben Borthwick, KARST’s head of Creative Programme and Paula Orrell, coordinator, Visual Arts South West using the framework provided by Speedwell – an Arts Council England and Plymouth Culture commission made by artist’s collective Still/Moving. The work was a response to the complexity of commemorating the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower: challenging accepted histories, behaviours and knowledge systems offers the possibility in this moment to consider, design and activate ‘new’ forms of ‘worlding’.
Artist and performer Dustin Ericksen brings Light, observed to a close with his Finissage Event ‘The eye ain’t heard, the ear ain’t seen’. With banjo and synthesiser, Ericksen will create improvisational music.
The musical aspect of the performance will be interfered with by two outside elements. First, the photography and light of Damian Griffiths, will trigger changes in the synthesised sound. Simultaneously, Ericksen will attempt to give a didactic explanation of the electromagnetic spectrum, which includes the light we see, and other wavelengths, like x-rays and microwaves.
8pm, 12 Nov 2019
An original audio-visual collaboration between Japanese psych band @qujaku_jpn and UK visual artists @impatv.
Developed during a residency in Japan in June 2019, this new production explores ideas of duality. Sound triggers light that in turn creates form via an amalgam of heavy, rhythmic ambience combined with visual projections, lighting and stage design. The resulting union will unfurl as an expansive spectacle to stimulate the senses. Special guests @group_a_band open each night of the tour with a spectacular new AV set.
Ensō – a circular symbol hand-drawn in one or two uninhibited brushstrokes to express a moment when the mind is free to let the body create. Sone – a unit of loudness; how loud a sound is perceived. Ensō Sone expresses a freedom to create loudness, which marks the starting point for this exciting new collaboration. Further ideas from Japanese Zen practice; of oneness, natural opposites and equilibrium, the spirit of harmonious cooperation, the visible and the invisible, absolute fullness in emptiness, simplicity, completeness, and endlessness are explored.
Co-commissioned by Visual Arts Plymouth CIC and KARST, Lockdown Tarot is a new fortune-telling performance by John Walter using a brand-new deck of cards that he drew during lockdown using the VR software Tilt Brush. This new tarot deck features images from Walter’s repertoire including allusions to art history, popular culture and politics. Lockdown Tarot responds to the current Covid-19 emergency using Walter’s trademark colour, humour and absurdity. Lockdown Tarot is composed of a minor arcana of four suits – the antibodies, vaccines, receptors and masks – and a higher arcana of 22 picture cards. The tarot is an algorithm, a repertoire of 78 images that can be shuffled and arranged into an infinite range of narrative sequences, and an ideal container for Walter’s epic, maximalist aesthetic. Lockdown Tarot demonstrates Walter’s approach to using hospitality as a device for engaging audiences in his ideas and images. The costume that he wears is a form of drag that is jestered as opposed to gendered. Audiences are empowered to ask him and the tarot anything. This leads to memorable and transformative conversations between strangers.
John Walter is a visual artist working across a diverse range of media including painting, moving image, installation, Virtual Reality and curating. His work is characterised by a disarming use of colour, humour and hospitality. Wellcome and Arts Council England have supported his work, and he was awarded the 2016 Hayward Curatorial Open for Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness. The Arts Council Collection and The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool have collected his work.
