Decolonising Aural Ecologies: AM Kanngieser, Shenece Oretha & Mhamad Safa

Book Tickets

FREE

Sat 23 Mar 2024

16.30 - 17.20

Free for all Saturday ticket holders

River Rooms

New Wing

Part of Somerset House Studios

In this conversation moderated by Mhamad Safa, artists AM Kanngieser and Shenece Oretha discuss the aural mechanisms that span the Oceanic to Caribbean geographies.

Both Kanngieser and Oretha’s practices can be said to question the dominant modes of listening in sound art practice. Transcending the boundaries of mere auditory perception, their work unveils and filters sound from technological and environmental sources, transforming these acoustic signals into an encompassing sensory experience. Emphasising the embodied experience of communities, often at the edges of representation in Western sound art, these indigenous oral and aural techniques might convey and reflect on ideas of neocolonialism, settler colonialism and capitalist extraction.

In experiencing their respective work, listening is arguably morphed into an act of witnessing, which the artists will discuss together with researcher and producer Mhamad Safa.

All Assembly talks are free to attend with any Saturday ticket, including tickets for individual performances.

Header Image: Shenece Oretha, Conspiracy After Jeanne Lee, 2021

Bios

AM Kanngieser

AM Kanngieser is an award-winning geographer and sound artist, working through listening and attunement to approach the relations between people, place and ecologies. Over the past decade they have focused on experimenting with sonic methods and practices (including field recordings, radio building and training, sonic ethnographies, oral testimonies, songs, sonifications, composition, sound walks) for environmental-geographical research. These methods and their application have been developed through sound events with The Natural History Museum London, Live Art Development Agency, Sound and Music and 2 Degrees Festival/Arts Admin and been variously outlined in papers for interdisciplinary journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, WIRES Climate Change, Progress in Human Geography and Environment and Planning D amongst many others.

Shenece Oretha

Shenece Oretha (b. Montserrat) is a London based multidisciplinary artist sounding out the mobilising potential of sound and listening in art. Through multi-vocal and multichannel sound installations, sculpture, print, workshops and text Shenece Oretha amplifies and celebrates listening and sound as an embodied and collective practice. Her works are attentive not just to the music, but the musicality of Black oral and aural traditions, ceremonies and literature together with the emotional, physical and communal resonance they generate.

Mhamad Safa

Mhamad Safa is a sound producer, architect and researcher, based between London and Beirut. His work focuses on the sonic make-ups of multi-scalar spatial and techno-scientific conditions. He explores their intersections with aural traditions, subcultural practices and environments of conflict. He was a fellow at Ashkal Alwan HWP in 2018. He graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently a Phd candidate in International Law at the University of Westminster. Safa has shown individual and collaborative artwork and performances at Goethe-Institut Lebanon, Beirut Arab Center for Architecture, Beirut the Institute for Contemporary Art, the Centre for Research Architecture in London and the Sharjah Architecture Triennial.

ACCESSIBILITY

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