Social Acoustics- MAGNUNA
Schedule
Sat Aug 20 2022 at 07:30 pm
Location
Bergen Kjøtt | Bergen, HO
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Social Acoustics - MAGNUNA. An evening of performance and film with: Doa Aly
Brandon LaBelle
Alex Reynolds & Alma Söderberg
Saturday 20. august 19:30
All are welcome to this free event!
The event is part of Social Acoustics, an exhibition by Jill Halstead and Brandon LaBelle presented at Bergen Kjøtt
12. - 28. august 2022
Exhibition open: fridays – sundays, 13:00 – 18:00
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Doa Aly
MAGNUNA - the performance, part 1
performed by Noura Seif (Nasa4Nasa)
MAGNUNA is a long-term research and performance project, dedicated to locating the ambiguous narratives of female madness in Arabo-Islamic literature from the Middle Ages. The research consists of finding, collecting and organizing the descriptions of female madness in the literature. The performances deploy the research findings in the creation of choreographies for female performers.
MAGNUNA - the performance, part 1 is inspired by the character of Hayuna al-Majnuna (the mad Hayuna), a Sufi mystic who lived in Iran in the 10th century. Hayuna is mentioned in al-Naysaburi’s Wise Madmen, written before 1015-16 AD. Her life is recorded in the oral tradition central to Islamic sacred texts, as a woman who vacillates between ecstatic rapture and suffering. A symbolic pattern, and a choreographic configuration is based on her sufi poetry and mantras. The circle, center, and square are the elements I use to illustrate the three planes of existence attributed to her, as a wandering mystic in search of the truth (the circle), longs to be united with her God (the center), and suffers the material plane (the square).
Doa Aly was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1976. She attended the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo, earning a BFA in painting in 2001. Her practice as an artist - spanning the mediums of writing, sculpture, video, and performance - combines her wide-ranging interests in anatomy, psychiatric disorders, gesture studies, canonic literature and current events. She presented her
performances at Art Jameel in Dubai (2019) and Sharjah Biennial 13 off-site project BAHAR, Abud Efendi Mansion, Istanbul (2017). Aly was shortlisted for the Abraaj Group Art Prize in 2017. She lives in Cairo, and is represented by Gypsum Gallery.
Brandon LaBelle
I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train
A collection of stories on friendship, music, love, the ocean and the encounters and lessons found in what the artist calls backroom life, LaBelle makes a performative reading. Informed by memories of teenage life, and experiences of extra-institutional initiatives and squatting cultures and communities, the work steers audiences into a labyrinth of the creative joys of what it means to build families.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and professor at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015). His latest book, Acoustic Justice (2021), argues for an acoustic model by which to engage questions of social equality.
Alex Reynolds and Alma Söderberg
The Hand that Sings
A voice says ‘bird’ and a bird appears in the eye, when only a second ago it was a hand, or a tree, or a whistle. Sounds of the manual extraction of cork are coaxed into music by a singing hand. Meanwhile, words in Spanish and English are traded on a rooftop, from one friend's mouth to another. The Hand that Sings attempts a sensorial resistance to fixity and hierarchy in order to remain all eyes and ears, attentive to detail and transformation.
Choreographer Alma Söderberg and filmmaker Alex Reynolds met in Brussels in 2016. Since then, their practices are intertwined. Although they work in different fields they share an obsession for the tension between the aural and the visual and its political, ethical, and aesthetic implications. They think about background and foreground, and about how listening is a tool to move into the depths of seeing.
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Where is it happening?
Bergen Kjøtt, Skutevikstorget 1,Bergen, NorwayEvent Location & Nearby Stays: