Tara Transitory (Negative Volumes)

http://www.liquidarchitecture.org.au/... The world is fucked. But, the gallery is empty. What will we do now? Negative Volumes 28 Mar 2017 ACCA, Melbourne Negative spaces are never blank. Just as there is no space around objects, only objects in space, there is no gap between sounds, since there is no possibility of silence. Instead what we hear is the noise of the layers, the various shades and feints and foley and interstitial emissions that, stitched together, produce the reassuring throb of frequencies we are schooled to call “background”. Similarly. A strobe light appears to come on and off, but what we see as light and dark made large, a perfect example of pure black and white, is not in fact discrete. What seems to be simply ‘on’ and ‘off’ is not a dyad. Rather, a strobe is a string, a set, a sequence of pulses giving way to each other: a swelling, an exploding, a fading and then a darkness, until the new swell lights up again. Despite appearances, despite conventional thinking, this is not binary. In this program, there’s no figure and no ground. There is no negative space. An empty institution is never completely empty. Instead, it becomes a spatial politic for the throwing of light and shade. We invite a queering of the spatial politics of the invisible and visible, of the notions of audible and inaudible – a questioning of the question of ‘the one’ or ‘the other’ – in order to enter the space opened up by this voluminous negation. In sound, how we structure sonic experience can provide models for how we structure community. The world is fucked. But, the gallery is empty. What will we do now? TARA TRANSITORY is transwoman exploring the intersections of gender, noise and ritual through performance and the collective trance. Originally from Singapore she considers herself a nomad. SARA MIKOLAI is an artist of Tamil and German descent, who creates experimental situations/performances and rituals. Together in Chiang Mai, Thailand, they run a space called E X T A N T A T I O N At NEGATIVE VOLUMES, Tara will perform a personal ritual, at once an erasure and an assertion of the body, where noise acts as an expression of things unwanted, a social static like the strobe light that moves through and uses her as it invisbilises her performance. Sara will perform in deep darkness, upsetting normative sense hierarchies, where collective bodily borders and perceptions dissolve into unfamiliar states of subjectivity. Presented by Liquid Architecture and ACCA in association with LISTEN As part of Liquid Architecture’s Hearing Privilege program, this event is supported by City of Melbourne. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first owners of this country, and we recognise that sovereignty was never ceded. We pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging. Video by Jason Heller hellerworks.net Liquid Architecture is an Australian organisation for artists working with sound. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.