Artists Phoebe Boswell & Laura Lima with Pianist Composer Nduduzo Makhathini in conversation with The Showroom Director Elvira Dyangani Ose about Ritual & Communion: sound as a site of care, healing, meditation, psychology, and protest.
This discussion includes a welcome by curator Katherine Finerty to IN·FLO·RES·CENCE’s focus on the cross-modality of art and sound, followed by Elvira Dyangani Ose’s introduction of the three speakers including: one of the project’s commissioned composers, South African Nduduzo Makhathini (who’s a pianist, scholar, and healer from South Africa); multimedia artist Phoebe Boswell based in London (whose drawing and immersive multimedia practice references gestures of protest and healing through language, the female form, nature, and the sublime), and hailing from Rio Laura Lima (whose conceptual practice references ritual, installation and performance with relation to bodies, extraction, life organisms, animals, and improvisation).
Image: Phoebe Boswell, film still from Ythlaf, 2018, Single channel video with audio, Courtesy of the artist and Sapar Contemporary, New York.
This conversation delves into what is the aesthetic of the ritual, and how creators can claim the legacy and transformation of cultural ceremony. It explores subjective creative approaches to ritual: the invitation, offering, and allure of the collective experience of a portal and communion – ritual as a vessel for intergenerational knowledge and collective healing. Through sound, music, and art, ritual is discussed as a form of storytelling, the performativity of orality, and immersive experiences – from a legacy of time to an adaptability of different paradigms, from oral, gestural, and technological expressions. Finally, this conversation speaks deeply about breath: as a sound, a physical essence – as silence, but a silence that can only exist with breath… A physical and spiritual translation of healing and hope.
Image: Nduduzo Makhathini. Photo: Siphiwe Mhlambi.
Phoebe Boswell addresses the role of sound in her practice as a meditation on finding a language, ritual, and spirituality in order to navigate ideas of home, belonging, and voice. In the liminal and immersive experiences she creates there is looping, dissonance, echoing, silence, and always – breath. She delves into resonant projects including The Matter of Memory (2014) installation addressing intergenerational storytelling, listening, and transcribing family memories into a collective listening experience; Ythlaf (2018) video about creating space for familial communication through rituals during a process of physical healing; and a dark, womb-like chamber installation from her Autograph exhibition The Space Between Things (2018), housing four videos and an immersive soundscape born out of a ritualistic practice for regaining strength and creating a poetic of endurance: A Broken Heart, Rupture, Rapture, and New Moon.
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Image: Phoebe Boswell, The Matter of Memory, 2014, Installation view Hasselblad Center, GIBCA 2015. Photo: Hendrik Zeitler
Image: Phoebe Boswell: The Space Between Things, installation at Autograph, London, 2018. Photo: Zoe Maxwell
Laura Lima reflects on her new ritual during locking revolving around ideas of de-acceleration, gravity, matter, sound, transparency, and echoes. She highlights her art-making process with regards to sound as relating to structures as a philosophical thinking and encountering dodecaphonic archives and field recordings. Projects referenced include a creative collective from the 90s which explored emptiness and hosted silent dinners; Cinema Shadow (2014) featuring a film that was simultaneously filmed and screened in real-time at a cinema; the dynamic (M=f / W=f) (2001) project where matter and time function as an unspecified fiction (from moments of escalated breath from human contact, to limbs navigating through jelly); and The Naked Magician (2015) which approaches ritual as an immersive exploration of counter-intuition and unpredictability.
Laura Lima References:
Image: Laura Lima: Jelly (M=f/ W=f), 2011. Photo courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Image: Laura Lima: The Naked Magician, 2011. Photo courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Nduduzo Makhathini expands this notion of magic by referencing a project call UmliNgoma, which is a combination of two Zulu words: Umlilo which means fire, and Ngoma which means ritual, dance, the drum, processes of healing, a dream… This conjures a discussion about having a language, or lack thereof, to create contexts and connections to the world, people, and cosmologies around us. Finally, he elaborates upon his new album Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds and reflects on the stages of creative ritual: preparation, invocation, healing, levitation, and rebirth.
Current and upcoming projects of our guest artists includes Nduduzo Makhathini’s IN·FLO·RES·CENCE composition Amahubo: Songs that Travel which our Artist-in-Residence pianist Elio Villafranca has interpreted in two takes, and his new album Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds; Phoebe Boswell's solo exhibition HERE at The New Art Exchange in Nottingham, UK (opening TBA); and Laura Lima’s gallery A Gentil Carica in Rio’s façade project GENTLE WALL for water washing and drinking open to the public. This installation of ritual creates a new daily ritual, very much tied into global, ancestral, and collective ideas of cleansing and purity, but in a new context of taking care of each other, and staying safe.
Image: Collective água de beber, GENTIL WALL, 2020 at A Gentil Carica, Rio.
PHOEBE BOSWELL
Phoebe Boswell (Kenya/UK) describes her work as a navigation of the space between, anchored to what she refers to as a 'restless state of diasporic consciousness,' owing to a personal history rooted in colonial traces, contradictory legacies, and patterns of migration. Combining draftswomanship and digital technology, she creates immersive installations and bodies of work which layer drawing, animation, sound, video, and interactivity in an effort to find language robust yet open and multifaceted enough to house, centre and celebrate complex communities, voices, hearts, and histories which, like her own, are often systemically marginalised, simplified, passified, homogenised, or sidelined as 'other'.
Boswell currently lives/works in London, and her work has been exhibited globally, including Autograph; Tiwani Contemporary; Sundance Film Festivals, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2015, and Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2016. She received the Future Generation Art Prize's Special Prize in 2017 and recently unveiled a large-scale public moving image work 'PLATFORM' as part of the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain in Geneva. Boswell is a recent recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists, a Ford Foundation Fellow, and her upcoming solo exhibition HERE at New Art Exchange, Nottingham (opening TBA).
Photo: Emile Holba
LAURA LIMA
Ever since letting a cow loose on Ipanema Beach in the mid 1990s, Laura Lima has put forth a body of work composed of what she sometimes describes as ‘images.’ Continually escaping easy classification, Laura Lima’s ‘images’ are attempts to visually articulate, in concrete reality, a personal glossary of concepts that the artist has worked and reworked during the course of her over 20 year career.
Born in 1971, the artist received a BA in Philosophy from the State University of Rio de Janeiro in the 1990s and also studied art at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage. In 1999, she founded the Organism RhR (Representative hyphen Representative), served as its first bureaucratic administrator, and created a glossary and archive of ideas including a philosophy of nothing, the non-functional, emptiness, and failure. Lima was the 2014 recipient of BACA, Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Arts, and is co-founder and adviser with Ernesto Neto and Marcio Botner of A Gentil Carioca, an artist-run gallery in Rio de Janeiro.
NDUDUZO MAKHATHINI
Nduduzo Makhathini is an award-winning pianist, improvisor and scholar from South Africa. He’s a recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, South African Music Award (SAMA) and AFRIMA, and has nine albums including his most recent Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds on Blue Note Records. Makhathini heads University of Fort Hare’s music department while completing his PhD at Stellenbosch University. His performs as both headline and sideman at international festivals and club concerts. Makhathini recently collaborated with Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis touring the US, South Africa and Vienna. He also has collaborated with alternative artists like DJs Black Coffee and Dacapo, and produced albums for singer-songwriters Msaki and Thandiswa Mazwai.
Makhathini was scheduled for a huge US and EU tour to promote his new album, but due to COVID-19 was unable to travel. Ironically, he’s now trending on social media performing from home as part of online international festivals such as Worldwide Music for Our Cultures, Act for Music and NPR Music. He recently received a Jazz Coalition Commission.
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ELVIRA DYANGANI OSE
Elvira Dyangani Ose is Director of The Showroom, London. She is currently affiliated to the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada and Tate Modern Advisory Council. Until November 2018, she served as Creative Time Senior Curator, where she most recently curated their 11th edition of their Summit. She is currently curating the publications of 34th Bienal De São Paulo and is the Curator for the PHotoESPAÑA, International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts.
Dyangani Ose was Curator of the eighth edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary art, (GIBCA 2015) and Curator International Art at Tate Modern (2011 – 2014). Ose has published and lectured on modern and contemporary African art and has contributed to art journals such as Nka and Atlántica. She studied a Doctoral Degree in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, New York; has a MAS in Theory and History of Architecture from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona; and a BA in Art History from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Photo: Christina Ebenezer
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