keyon prefers not to contextualise.
voices dedicates a space to the voice in all its simplicity and complexity.
It makes space for the voice’s capacity to evoke, to cause one to follow and to travel—via the sonic image, by way of the imagination. voices will host numerous voice contributions that over time will turn into trust & confusion’s anthology of short stories and musings, poems and scores, or narrations of works, bodies, and life shared by artists and writers across the globe. Recorded with devices at hand—the phone, laptop, or voice recorder—voices looks for the grain of the voice in times of the glitch; somewhere between melody and sense-making, in the transfer of timbre and byte.
Tom Engels
keyon prefers not to contextualise.
“It never gets easier.”
Jalal Toufic is a thinker, writer, and artist. He lives in Beirut, Lebanon.
“Do you know what a shadow is?”
Alice Chauchat studies attention, distance, and approximation by dancing with people. She lives in Berlin, Germany.
“Even though people in this area cannot see you, I have made it my mission to find you.”
Nahi Mitti is something like a cultural practitioner/artist, her body something like a cave. She lives in the United Kingdom.
“The debutant” is a message to a friend. It is a flow of live thought recalling a sensation that some of our daily gestures and poses are akin to independent forms passing through us and leaving us with the sensation of a debutant.
Alexandra Sukhareva is an artist exploring the stretch between matter and gesture. She lives in Moscow, Russia.
Hong is a special member of the artists’ studio, a hen who likes people and likes moving around artists in the studio. Being quiet and silent most of the time, she will cry before laying eggs and cluck in response to your call. In this sound work, Xiao Hong reads the poem "Silence" by the poet Lü De'an, which previously appeared in the artist’s video work "Prison Architect" filmed in Tai Kwun.
Cao Fei is an artist living in Beijing. She mixes social commentary, popular aesthetics, references to surrealism, and documentary conventions in her films and installations. Her works reflect on the rapid and developmental changes that are occurring in Chinese society today.
“Brian (cannot be defined)” gives voice to Brian Eagen Lau. Assigned male at birth, Brian later discovered and learned about her intersex body as feminine features started developing during puberty. She recounts relations to her own body, her family, and visits to lingerie shops and thrift stores with her mother when she was a child. Finding joy in belly dancing herself, belly dancing music, reminiscent of drums played as an intermezzo in Chinese opera, intersects her speech.
Beatrix Pang (they/them) is a visual artist and an independent publisher of Small Tune Press (@smalltunepress). Pang is also a co-founder of zinesters' collective ZINE COOP (@zinecoop) and queer mobile library Queer Reads Library (@queerreads_library).
With her background in the theatre and dual cultural identity as Thai-Hongkonger, Brian Eagen Lau is passionate about using arts and critical pedagogy to guide her students in rethinking gender, race and their identities. She is venturing into belly dancing to further explore how her body may speak more than words. (@brianeagenlau)
Garden of Left Hand is a song sung in a non-verbal language that unfolds itself within the singing itself.
Tori Wrånes is a vocalist and transdisciplinary artist. Choreography with sound might be a good way to describe her work. She lives in Oslo, Norway.
“Today I am a dancer at this museum. I may be performing several simple actions — they were conceived and written by those who cherish the power of words and movement. Depending on the length of shadows and the number of people in the room, I will choose which drifts to perform. Some require approaching strangers, some — singing loud the first song that comes from memory, others — immersing in my own thoughts with eyes closed.”
Raimundas Malašauskas is a storyteller stirring up meaning. He lives in Brussels, Belgium. Trista Ma gives voices to characters and designs their costumes. She lives in Peng Chau, Hong Kong.
“And now in darkness, we feel so tight. Tighter and tighter, we cannot hide.”
Dardan Zhegrova seeks the playful within the dramatic and sometimes appears as Lucky Pierre. He lives in Pristina, Kosovo.
Twisting the tongue, like: “tone-out-ka-pharr-pyar-tel-pharr-ka-pyar-phaun-tel-pharr-ka-phaun,” or “Frogs under a log, some flat and some fat.”
Moe Satt is an artist and curator and lives in Yangon, Myanmar.
Upon invitation by Zheng Bo, Torsten Feuerstein reveals the voice of the Black Forest, a large and densely forested mountain range in Southwest Germany.
Torsten Feuerstein is a recorder of forest voices and is based in Germany. Zheng Bo looks beyond the human and is based in Hong Kong.
“I have to give back all names.”
SERAFINE1369, formerly known as Last Yearz Interesting Negro, channels and traverses the intimate and celestial forces that govern the body, and give shape to them in return. Josh Anio Grigg often collaborates with SERAFINE1369 and works with sound, multimedia, and installation for performance and live art. They both live in London.
“This voice is a big whale swimming slowly in this room.”
Laure Prouvost lives in Brussels and favours twisted communication.
Philosophical is a song which is part of the “Study of Slope”, an installation and a collection of songs made for trust & confusion. Generously opening up the unlikely musical spectrum of tone-deaf singing, Lapelytė questions the stringent and exclusionary principles that govern music production by putting non-conforming ears and voices centre stage. Philosophical is based on the writings of Sean Ashton and accompanied by the saxophone, harp, and violin with John Butcher, Rhodri Davies, Angharad Davies.
Lina Lapelytė revels amongst voices aslant and lives in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Pillowese is a new language developed by Lydia Ourahmane and felicita. After introducing the Pillowese alphabet, Lydia and felicita enter into conversation, followed by Xiuching Tsay, Steph Hartop, and felice bauer sharing their dreams in Pillowese. “I ate the flower and your eyes got bigger.”
The Pillowese alphabet and a translation of Pillowese can be found here.
Lydia Ourahmane and felicita recently rested their ears on the pillows of London, Caïro, Palermo, Shanghai, Vilnius, Lago di Como, Montserrat, and Marseille.
CAConrad reads IGNITION CHRONICLES, a poem in nine parts. It was written with the help of a crow named Poet who brought 12 gifts that would guide the writing: a twig, a tiny nub of translucent plastic, a dried red berry, a piece of round gold foil, a red half-moon piece of processed cat food….
CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They write poems while traveling the highways of America.
“To be confused is not to be lost. For a while, perhaps, it feels like it. Or, to wrestle with confusion is to be caught by a chance to lose something.”
Yang Yeung writes and curates in the stretch between sound and silence. She lives in Hong Kong.
Sitting at the seashore, Zheng Mahler read from scientific papers and news articles investigating the mysterious life of the “52hz whale”— an individual whale of an unidentified species that sings and voices with a frequency higher than others. As its calls cannot be perceived by fellow whales, it is known as the loneliest whale on earth — but is it really alone and what does it say about the human preoccupation with loneliness? In the background, a crane evokes a whale-like mourning.
Zheng Mahler are the Chinese-Australian artist Royce Ng and the Australian anthropologist Daisy Bisenieks and they do not take their respective disciplines for granted. Zheng Mahler live on Lantau Island, Hong Kong.
“This voice is a shadow on your face.”
Laure Prouvost lives in Brussels and favors twisted communication.
In Invocation, Isabel Lewis guides the listener into a state of responsiveness. By tuning into an other being, forms morph and landscapes change — together they give way to dance.
Isabel Lewis was born in Santo Domingo and lives in Berlin. Working with the transformational power of the encounter, she creates possibilities for species and senses to meet.
Simone Forti reads “Dream Cities” from her book Oh, Tongue (2003).
Simone Forti was born in Florence, Italy, in 1935 and grew up in Los Angeles. She began dancing with Anna Halprin in 1955 and has kept changing the course of dance ever since.
In Indigo Story, W.G.—short for White ’n Gray—recounts having cold milkshakes in the cafeteria, meeting a genderqueer nephew dressed in a tuxedo, and their acts of loving and being loved. Life as seen through the eyes of a cat.
Candice Lin is a Chinese-American artist and lives with Roger, her cat, in Los Angeles.
In Chatting with One Bird and then with A Group of Birds Where A Kitten Briefly Appears the human and animal voice meet. They get entangled and confused in an interspecies back and forth. Suddenly, a kitten passes by.
Eduardo Costa is an Argentinian artist based in Buenos Aires. He lived 25 years in the US, 4 in Brazil, and does not believe in the importance of the visual over other kinds of perception.
Inaugurating voices, SERAFINE1369 brings Full Moon in Scorpio, a new text based on their dream records on the 26th of April 2020 and that year’s full moon in Scorpio, which occurred at the start of May. Drawing from the past, reading for the now.
SERAFINE1369, formerly known as Last Yearz Interesting Negro, lives in London. Channelling and traversing the intimate and celestial forces that govern the body, they give shape to them in return.