Survival Kit is an international contemporary art festival that was launched in 2009 as a reaction to the changes the economic crisis had brought to Latvia. The Survival Kit festival is organised by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in Riga as an annual call for artists and spectators to observe, comment and act, focusing their attention on a different subject every year.
These projects hve been carried out within the framework of Survival Kit. Art linking society, knowledge and activism and with the support of the Culture 2007–2013 programme of the European Union.
Larry Achiampong: Meh Mogya (Sample Of Me)
Larry Achiampong is presenting an audio-based performance that involves communal listening and participation. This merges his research on the audible potentials of personal and non-personal expression with sampling and sound recording devices and processes. As part of this process Achiampong observes, samples and re-presents audible collages of the sounds of Highlife, a musical genre from Ghana that predates Jazz music.
Achiampong tells and mixes stories about his own history while focusing on his relationship to the legacy of Highlife music, and attempts to weave audio from additional vinyl records that connect with the subject matter.
This installation relates to Achiampong's ongoing Sample of Me project at The Showroom.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Aural Contract – Latvia’s Systems Of Simultaneous Translation
Lawrence Abu Hamdan develops an audio essay and collective listening performance produced in collaboration with courtroom interpreter Laura Bleidere. The event combines Abu Hamdan’s current research into the politics of listening and the role of the voice in law with an exploration of the political performance of language, translation and the role of the courtroom interpreter in Latvia. This new work uses a custom-made system of simultaneous translation to sonically inhabit the audio infrastructure at the core of its investigation.
Recorded extracts from the project’s interviews, performances and activities are broadcast in this event alongside archived audio recordings from numerous and global sources such as the trial of Milosevic and samples from the UK Asylum Tribunal.
This is part of the ongoing Aural Contract project at The Showroom.
Emma Smith: Playback
Emma Smith presents Playback, a participatory game to exchange tacit knowledge and intuited response to place. The game is exhibited as a box set, created especially for this event, and includes a series of monologue scripts in Latvian, Russian, Belarusian, Polish and Ukranian to be played by participants.
The public are invited to play the work and create 20 plays within a two-hour period, with these broadcast live from the space.
This relates to Smith's Playback project at The Showroom.
In September 2011 The Showroom presented three Communal Knowledge projects at Survival Kit, an international contemporary art festival based in Latvia.
MoreCurrently living in Lebanon, Abu Hamdan has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad. His work deals with the relationship between listening and politics, borders, human rights, testimony and truth, and is in the collections of MoMA New York and Van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven.
MoreCo-founder and co-director of art collective Delta Arts Smith is an artist with a social practice that is both research and production-based and responds to site-specific issues.
MoreLondon-based artist Achiampong has exhibited and performed in various spaces within the UK and abroad including Tate Britain and Iniva, London, Novas Contemporary Urban Center, Liverpool, Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam and Antje oeklesund, Berlin.
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Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Aural Contract – Latvia’s Systems Of Simultaneous Translation, 2011, performance at Survival Kit 3, Latvia.
Larry Achiampong, Meh Mogya (Sample Of Me), 2011, performance at Survival Kit 3, Latvia.
Emma Smith, Playback, 2011, performance at Survival Kit 3, Latvia.
Survival Kit 3, Latvia.
