Exhibition: 5 – 7 December, 11.00-18.00 (11.00-16.00 on Saturday)

Opening Night: 4 Dec 6-9pm | Book Tickets (free)

Silent Night Opening and Research Symposium: 6 December, 17.30-21.00 | Book Tickets (free)

Performance Evening: 10 December, 19.00-22.00 | Book Tickets (free)

Reve Kan, Tarik Haskić, Yifeat Ziv, Ava Halloran, Yinan Ji, Neil Milton, Fang Xi, Samuel Loynes, Li Yilei, Iris Chun-Tzu Chang, Marco Tarantino

In the introduction to her Sonic Meditations (1974) composer Pauline Oliveros suggests that her eponymous text scores might produce “through continuous work [..] heightened states of awareness [that] may represent a tuning of mind and body”.

Heightened States of Awareness takes its title from Oliveros and brings together the work of the eleven students graduating from the MA Sound Arts in 2019. The exhibited pieces invite a ‘tuning of mind and body’, presenting approaches that may foreground a non-hierarchical listening amidst multi-sensate entanglements with each other and the environment. The exhibition title might also be understood with respect to this moment of increasing environmental and political emergency, asking us to hear questions that attend to local and personal concerns as well as tuning in to wider notions of social in/justice, and sometimes crossing the boundary of the ‘audible’ altogether.

The exhibition includes sound, audio-visual and mixed-media installation and sculpture presented across three spaces at London College of Communication - CRiSAP, Lower Gallery/SU Gallery and the Typo Glass Box - on view throughout the post-graduate exhibition period (Show 2).

The Research Symposium on Friday 6 Dec starting at 5.30pm, offers an insight into themes present in the exhibition, with talks from guest speakers Mikhail Karikis and Anuka Ramischwili-Schäfer, as well as contributions from the artists and the Course Leader David Mollin, chaired by Louise Gray. The symposium will present an opportunity to engage directly with the artists' research, through conversation and via the display of their research posters, a unique facet of the course. Immediately following the symposium, the Silent Night, offers a dedicated opportunity to experience the exhibition ‘after hours’ until 9pm, and includes live performances by Tarik Haskić and Samuel Loynes.

A Performance Evening at Iklectik on Tuesday 10 Dec, 7-10pm acts as a live ‘suffix’ to the exhibition, extending some of the works beyond the gallery whilst affording others an opportunity to present another aspect of their practice in a final public celebration of the group’s work over the last eighteen months together.

Download the exhibition guide here: MASA_HeightenedStatesofAwareness [PDF 289kb]

The works: 

Reve Kan’s installation invites visitors to hear some sounds of the recent protests in Hong Kong, meditating on the liminal quality of slogans that “like water” weave furtively around high-rise buildings without apparent source, where infrasound becomes a metaphor for these long-distance communications in their partial opacity.

Tarik Haskic’s multimedia installation is performed on a group of instruments/sound sculptures made from found objects and materials. These performances follow textual instructions written down on sheets of paper and passed between performers during each live iteration.

Yifeat Ziv’s surround-sound installation The Echo of Our Breath, meditates on the artist’s recent experience in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, where the dense vegetation - limiting visual movements and heightening an auditory awareness - creates a ‘natural reverberation’. Constantly affected by the changing amount of oxygen in the installation space, this work invites visitors to hear the unseen impact of their own presence, reflecting on the air that we breathe as a decreasing resource.

Ava Halloran’s In Situ finds an abstract language through ‘mapping’, installation and sound that concludes a three-month period of research into the site of the Elephant and Castle roundabout. The work argues against the fantasy of ‘objective’ site-specific approaches and for an always-already partial and situated complexity.

Yinan Ji’s multi-media installation Falling Stars plays with scale and legibility, inverting the hierarchy of sound and image in a work that documents the continued phenomenon of ‘square dancing’, a ubiquitous tradition in Chinese urban centers where “the loudness and banality of the old remixed military music comes with historical stigma and renders the dancers unacceptable and liminal”.

Like an interpretive sign-language video inset in a television broadcast, but exploded into three dimensions, Neil Milton’s In Motion: Not Silent Poetry alternates between a video of sign-language poet Donna Williams reciting a poem; an audio file challenging the primacy of communicative modalities; and a projection of lips silently conveying a related theoretical text.

Fang Xi’s Smiling Depression is a multi-channel composition and installation that draws attention to the eponymous condition that doubly ‘masks’ what is already an invisible illness. In this way the work challenges social and medical narratives that tend to look for visual diagnoses and seeks instead to raise awareness and extend solidarity through musical composition, sound design and the artist’s own sound poetry that draws on research through conversation.

Samuel Loynes’ The Fleeting Feeling that Passed You By meditates on the creative process itself and reflects on its structural conditions, primarily here that of the ‘bedroom musician’. It takes the form of an audio-visual installation that shares a brief loop of material from a personal archive spanning the last decade of the artist’s not-yet made public music compositions. These are augmented by live performance that extrapolates them into fully-formed songs.

Li Yilei’s multimedia kinetic sculptures vibrate a series of hand-made metal plates which through paper and sand manifest the “entwining vibrations, energies and frequencies of fingers, palms, stomach, throat, ears, womb, muscles, joints, veins” that, in their multi-centered floor-based array, usher in an intimate listening.

Marco Tarantino’s tape installation explores the peculiarity through which humans observe the natural world, critiquing dichotomous narratives that separate ‘nature’ from the ‘human’ environment, reflecting instead on their complex and mutual effects.

Curator: Irene Revell  

Course Leader: David Mollin  

@masoundlcc

The graduate exhibition for the MA Sound Arts at London College of Communication (UAL) is part of the wider LCC Postgraduate Shows 2019, bringing together the work of the students graduating from the MA Sound Arts in 2019.

About London College of Communication 
London College of Communication (LCC), part of University of the Arts London (UAL), is a pioneering world leader in media and design education and research programmes geared to preparing students for successful creative careers. Our courses are known for being industry focused with students taught by an inspiring community of experienced academics, technical experts and leading specialist practitioners. Generations of award-winning photographers, filmmakers, screenwriters, journalists, broadcasters, designers and advertising and PR professionals have started their careers at LCC, and today’s graduates continue to be highly sought after and win prestigious international awards.  

www.arts.ac.uk/lcc | @LCCLondon | #LCCPostgrad 

Please note that guests are not permitted to bring alcohol into events. In the interest of security, bag searches will be in operation throughout.

Accessibility
London College of Communication strives to provide an inclusive and accessible environment for our students and visitors. If you have any specific access requirements for an event or exhibition, please contact us by email (events@lcc.arts.ac.uk) or phone (020 7514 8498) in advance of your visit so that we can make any necessary preparations or adjustments. For full access and route guides for our building, please view our AccessAble accessibility guide.

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Important Filming and Photography Notice:
Please note that filming and photography will be taking place throughout the exhibition. Both bigger crowds, smaller groups and individuals may be captured on camera.

All imagery and footage may at some point be published on the College's website, social media channel and in print.

Image: Marco Tarantino (photo: Jonathan Toto)