Magnified Ear
1 - 18 June 2023
Thurs to Sun, 12-5pm
Private View :
Thursday 1 June 2023, 6-8pm
Featuring sound performances by Phoebe riley Law, Isaac Maxwell & Crimson Chaos, Mengting Zhuo & Li Song. Ranging from acoustic room measurements, sonic intervention, and object interaction, these artists reflect the creative range of soundscape.
Free entry or pay what you can. Book ticket here.
Public Event #1
Artist Talk: Hsi-Nong Huang - 10 Jun 15:00-16:30
Join us for a discussion between artist Hsi-Nong Huang and Ben Fitton, focusing on her latest two pieces exhibited at Magnified Ear. Please book your space here.
Public Event #2
Soundwalk Workshop: 11 Jun 13:00-14:30. Starts at Goldsmiths Library.
Join John L. Drever, Professor of Acoustic Ecology and Sound Art at Goldsmiths, for an everyday pedestrian soundwalk in Deptford. For more information and to book your space please click here.
Magnified Ear is a group exhibition explores the nature of architectural rhythm through sound dialogue that emerges from architecture and its space. The featured artwork includes sound installations, sculptures, film, performances, and text, questioning whether the sound of human interactions constructs architecture beyond its need to exist.
Amidst the hustle and bustle of our daily grind, sounds born of human interactions within spaces silently capture the essence of our everyday life. Curated by curating matters, Magnified Ear aims to shed light on the nature of architectural rhythm through artworks that delve into the sound dialogue between architecture and its surrounding space. We seek to explore how the sounds, whether intentionally or coincidentally produced during social encounters, can shape the architecture and space beyond their functional purposes, and how various works can establish sound as a focal point for memory within the gallery space.
The exhibition features seven groups of artists, including both UK-based artists and those residing in EU countries. They explore through fieldwork and allude to the relationship between sound and space, questioning its often overlooked role as a conduit for performance, continuity, and manifestations of power. The artworks magnify a multitude of conversations, ranging from reflections on remembering and forgetting. Through the incorporation of sound installations, sculptures, films, performances, and text, we offer critical and celebratory perspectives on the sounds produced through these encounters among humans, non-human entities, and the space.
Curating matters is a curatorial collective founded by Yang Li and Jingwen Weng in July 2021. Our aim is to raise awareness for marginalised, underrepresented, and invisible communities in the artistic realm and social justice. Drawing from our multicultural and interdisciplinary backgrounds, we reflect on surrounding cultures through self-evaluation in a casual, accessible, and imaginative way.
Artists Exhibiting
Andrei Cucu
Andrei Cucu is a multimedia/sound artist and sound designer from Berlin trying the boundaries between sound/image/text/space/nature. His work often approaches translations between these different languages, with a special focus on sound, trying the interstices, correlations, interactions. The narrative and poetic possibilities of manipulating these languages are explored and expanded in sound pieces, audiovisual pieces and images.
Hsi-Nong Huang
Hsi-Nong Huang lives and works in London, UK. Huang’s work comes from the idea of creating a meeting point. She transforms memory and time into a physical format. Movement creates moments, moments draw emotions, emotions become duration. Huang works almost exclusively with wood and steel. She sees these materials as two elements, and explores how they support each other; how they are constructed with and alongside each other.
Huang has exhibited both in the UK and China with recent group exhibitions including Reflections: Part 3: Sculpture by Women Artists, WORKPLACE, London; and London Grads Now. 21, Saatchi Gallery, London. She is currently undertaking a year as a Wood Workshop Fellow at City & Guilds of London Art School, London; she is the recipient of Samuel Ross Black British & POC Artist Grants, 2021 and was selected for the first ever Claudia Rankine Award, 2019.
Georg Klein
With a background in composition, Georg Klein has developed a multi-faceted artistic practice since 2001, in which he explores sound as a medium of art. In his installations and interventions - especially in public space - he condenses acoustic and visual, situational and political aspects into a 'space of tension' ('Spannungsraum') in which visitors are sometimes involved interactively or participatively.
His interventions in the physical and medial public space have sometimes triggered fierce reactions from the public and the press - and have received numerous awards (Gustav Mahler Composition Prize Austria, German Sound Art Prize, Media Space Prize NRW, European Media Art Festival Prize, IGA Sound Art Prize, Audio Walk Award). Numerous scholarships and residencies abroad led to site-specific works in various cultural contexts (e.g. Villa Massimo / Casa Baldi Rome, BM Contemporary Art Center Istanbul, Daegu Contemporary Art Festival South Korea, Villa Aurora Los Angeles), individual research trips have taken him to Iran and North Korea, among other places. In addition, he worked for several years as musical director at the theatre (Berliner Ensemble with Peter Zadek) and in multiple collaborations with the
German National Radio DeutschlandFunk Kultur (Marcus Gammel).
Tomoko Hojo
Tomoko Hojo is an artist working within the fluidity between sound, music and performance. Recently Hojo works on the theme that makes (women’s) silenced voices audible in the history, with a special focus on Japanese women who have relations to western countries, such as Yoko Ono, Sadayakko Kawakami. Her works has been exhibited and performed at Tate Modern (London), Issue Project Room (NYC), ZKM (Karlstuhe), Emily Harvey Foundation (NYC), Contemporary Art Center Aomori (Japan), SA))_gallery (Moscow), Scandinavia House (NYC), Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin), TOKAS Hongo (Tokyo), IKLECTIK (London), mh PROJECT (NYC / Japan).
In 2023, She has published an exhibition catalogue ‘Unfinished Descriptions’, a documentation of a show based on the research about Yoko Ono and her exhibition in 1966 in London through yoin press.
Li Song
Li Song is a London-based musician and computer programmer. He performs improvised music with his computer and composes music using electronics and acoustic instruments. His collaborative project with Zhu Wenbo, No Performance, focuses on compositions using environment sounds, acoustic instruments, computer algorithms, and random sequence. He is also a member of computer network music ensemble and research group, [ _ _ _ ], focusing on algorithmic collaboration. Recent works include Two Snare Drums (Infant Tree 2022), [ _ _ _ ] (with Jia Liu and Shuoxin Tan, SUPERPANG 2022) and Text (with Zhu Wenbo, Zoomin' Night 2021).
Pheobe riley Law
I work across multiple mediums including sound installation, film, sculpture and performance. Often my work seeks to re-evaluates the use and meaning of functional spaces / devices and question aspects of human activity through both division and borders.
Key themes include machine ecologies, borders between species within their environments, salt, salinity, functionality and sound.
Recent work includes Machine Equities at Fabrica Research Centre (Treviso, Italy), Oh O Salinity at Humber Street Gallery, Hull Arts Research and Initiative centre, (Hull), The Hancock Museum, 36 Lime Street Gallery (Newcastle). Emerging Artist Installation at Delaval Hall (Northumberland), A layer of Liquid Water at Spikersuppa Gallery (Oslo, Norway), Residency and tour with Making tracks at Cove park (Scotland). Herd (Newcastle University) and further works at The Baltic, Hatton Gallery New- castle, The Republic Gallery (Blythe), Funen Art Academy Odense (Denmark), LevelOne Gallery Hamburg (Germany), Paradise Air (Japan), Detroit Gallery (Stockholm), Iklectik (London), Cafe Oto (London) & the Coachhouse (Brighton) and sound / score based performances at Ftarri (Tokyo), for BBC Radio 3, Fort Process.
Yuyan Wang
Yuyan Wang (b. 1989, China) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the impact of image creation in media, representation, and the attention economy. Both poetic and political, her practice focuses on the mutation of the industrial production chain of images, whose endless development leads to an abstraction of reality. Through repurposing images, her films reverse and challenge the images' functions and meanings, breaking down the hierarchies between found, processed, and created material. By utilising editing, sound, and immersive environments, Wang alternates between creating focus from distraction and creating ambiguity from clarity.
Jez riley French
Focusing on sound as material and subject, French's work involves installation, intuitive composition / improvisation, scores, film and photography.
French also lectures and runs workshops on located sound / field recording as an art form and has developed and expanded the use of extended techniques and the role of durational listening. He also works as a microphone builder and a curator, with a long standing, active involvement in research on the gendering of creative cultures.
French works extensively on long form recordings of surfaces, spaces and situations and developing the concept of photographic scores and ‘scores for listening’. Aspects of his work have been exhibited or performed at galleries including Tate Modern, Tate Britain,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and Paradise Air (Japan), Spikersuppa Lydgalleri (Norway), Steklenik (Slovenia) etc.
Key works capture the sound of minerals dissolving, ants consuming fallen fruit, buildings vibrating, teleferica’s interacting with locales, the infrasound of domestic spaces, glaciers in Iceland and the tonal resonances of natural and human objects in the landscape.
Mengting Zhuo
Mengting Zhuo (b. Guangzhou, China, 1990) creates performances, participatory installations, and concerts investigating the capacities and limits of social relations. Presence and liveness is at the heart of her practice, both for the audience and the artist.
Recently, she is exploring sonic language and the politics of listening through a series of happenings predominantly using “non-instruments” and the body. Most recent scores were developed for MAO Torino, Italy and Cafe OTO London, UK.
As a performer and director, she has made work for theatres, galleries and other spaces, including a bar, a karaoke club, residential accommodation, and online. She studied Performance Making at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is now based. Her work has been presented internationally, including in the UK, China, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic and Slovakia.