Invocations for Hilma af Klint on Serpentine Radio, with Leah Clements, Clodagh Emoe, Daria Martin and Zadie Xa
On the occasion of the exhibition, Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen, artists were invited to produce sound pieces for Serpentine Radio responding to the idea of an ‘invocation’ through the prism of their own practice. Contributions include conversations, inductions, meditations, music and other works. Participants include Leah Clements, Clodagh Emoe, Daria Martin, Zadie Xa and more.
Leah Clements, Ever Feel like Someone Is Missing?
A reading of entries from an online support site for parents who feel an uncanny and unspeakable sense of a child being missing finds a woman describing a perception of ghostliness – an ineffable, simultaneous presence and absence of a child. In several responses, parents discuss the experience of mourning children lost through a miscarriage or in childbirth, while others reflect on the feeling of ‘someone being missing’ as a religious sense of purpose, a calling towards parenthood. The sound piece transitions into an in-conversation between Clements and artist Owen Lacey, both vanishing-twin survivors, sharing their individual responses, the limitations of language to describe them and of the family unit to account for them.
Leah Clements (b. 1989) is a London-based artist whose practice is concerned with emotional experiences, intricate details in individual relationships and group dynamics, as well as the oddities inherent in ‘normality’ and human interaction. Empathy and self/other boundaries have recently been explored through moving image, live work and group meetings in Beside at Chisenhale Gallery (2015), Beside Chisenhale Gallery Online Commission (2016), You Promised Me Poems, Vitrine (2015), and the ongoing Empath Project at Res.
Clodagh Emoe, Ho Nyn Kairos (Time of the Now)
A meditation on time and the connections that undermine its linearity. A future, artificially generated voice encourages the listener to imagine Hilma af Klint’s work through hearing and imagination. Foregrounding experience and perception.
Clodagh Emoe’s works, which often take place in a collective setting, are underpinned by an in-between or ‘other’ temporality or state. Projects have been commissioned and shown internationally, including We Are and Are Not, The Model, Sligo (2015); The Things We See, 9th Taipei Biennial (2014); An Exercise in Seeing, Red Cross Forest, Wicklow (2013); Proposition 7, The National Art Studio, Seoul; Parodos, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2012); Psychic Sleep and Collective Thought, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery (2012), dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012) and Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2013); and Metaphysical Longings (2014). Collaborative projects include Mystical Anarchism with Simon Critchley.
Daria Martin, Conversation with a Mirror-Touch Synaesthete
While synaesthesia has long been celebrated by artists as an expansion of conventionally available sense, mirror-touch synaesthesia, a newly discovered form, connects vision to social worlds. Mirror-touch synaesthetes feel conscious tactile sensations on their own bodies when they see another person, or even an object, being touched. People with mirror-touch also have heightened sensory perceptions of objects, including artworks, that are not touched but merely observed. This interview between Martin and an anonymous mirror-touch synaesthete was one of 13 conducted as part of an AHRC Fellowship that sought to create a new model of empathic spectatorship based on mirror-touch experience.
Daria Martin (b. 1973, San Francisco) has lived and worked in London since 2002. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including Maureen Paley, London (2016); ACCA, Melbourne (2013) and Milton Keynes Gallery (2012). Group exhibitions include The New Human, Moderna Museet Malmö (touring to Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2016); SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms, 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015); 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014); In the Holocene, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2012); Dancing Through Life, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Move: Art and Dance since the 60s, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2011). Daria Martin is represented by Maureen Paley, London.
Zadie Xa, Ride the Chaktu // First Contact
Zadie Xa’s Ride the Chaktu // First Contact pastiches music, voices, breath and the sound of ubiquitous technology into a layered, rhythmic composition inducing a trance-like state of listening.
Zadie Xa is a London-based, Canadian artist whose work explores identity, desire and personal fantasy. Xa completed an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2014) and a BFA from Emily Carr University (2007), Vancouver. Upcoming and previous exhibitions include With Institutions Like These, curated by Victor Wang and Alex Meurice, Averard Hotel, London (2016); Caput-Medusae, Westminister Waste, London (2016); At Home Salon: Double Acts, Marcelle Joseph Projects, London (2016); Studio Voltaire Open 2015, London and Frosted and Defrosted, Albion 44, London (2014).
