Walk so silently that the bottom of your feet become ears*

Lecture and Listening Session 

Featuring: Andrea Belfi, Wojtek Blecharz, Katarzyna Krakowiak, Kyoka, Karolina Łebek, Konrad Smoleński

Lecture: Joanna Petkiewicz & Nick Meehan, Institute for Sound and Music, Berlin

Curated by Kasia Sobucka and Joanna Petkiewicz

Monday, 27th November 2023

19.00 Doors | 19.30 Start

Magazzino Gallery, Palazzo Contarini Polignac

Dorsoduro 878, 30123 Venice

The intimate listening session features sound works by six outstanding contemporary artists and musicians. It presents a diverse fusion of practices, spanning installation, performance, field recording, voice, and spatial studies. Guided by the ethos of Pauline Oliveros's deep listening and situated within the reflective context of the recent practice of Berlin's Institute for Sound and Music, the session reveals subtle connections, reshaping our understanding of sound as an indispensable layer in space and meaning-making.

LISTENING PROGRAMME:

Konrad Smolenski, we are close to the truce, 6'55, 2023
Andrea Belfi, Anticline (Ore), 10'01, 2017
Karolina Łebek, minute to minute, 16'30, 2023
Katarzyna Krakowiak, Reading William Blake (fragments), 7'30, 2022
Wojtek Blecharz, SONGLINE (fragment), 12'29, 2021
Kyoka, improvised live recording, 02'59, 2023; based on Intl-A_Bln from Is (Is Superpowered), 2014

ABOUT THE ARTISTS 

Andrea Belfi - a drummer, composer, and experimental musician, Italian-born, based in Berlin. Over the years Belfi has built a sound world blending the complex timbres of the acoustic with the endless possibilities of the electronic. Belfi has a strong live reputation internationally and his performances are known to be energetic and hypnotic, featuring long-arching immersive soundscapes. He was invited by Thom Yorke to open for his solo show on an international tour in 2019. His last releases Ore and Strata gained Belfi many new fans including tastemakers Mary Anne Hobbs, Gilles Peterson, and Sasha Frere-Jones among others. Over the last few years, he’s been collaborating and touring with artists such as Nils Frahm, Mouse on Mars, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Mike Watt, Circuit des Yeux, David Grubbs. He has been on stage at Philharmonie de Paris, Montreux Jazz Festival, The Greek Theater (Los Angeles), Unsound Festival (Krakow), Barbican Center (London), Issue Project Room (New York), and CTM Festival (Berlin).  read more

Wojtek Blecharz - a pioneer in the realms of merging music, technology and site-specific installations; Wojtek is one of today's most sought-after composers. His opera-installations create a multi-sensory performance, immersing the listener fully in the music. Born in Gdynia (Poland) in 1981, he graduated with honours from Frederic Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw in 2015 and received a PhD in music composition at the University of California San Diego. His work has been performed at the Grand Theatre National Opera in Warsaw, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Salzburg Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art in Tel Aviv, Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (Australia), MATA Festival (New York), Mostly Mozart Festival (New York), Klangwerkstadt (Berlin), Hamburger Bahnhof, and others. He composed pieces for the Forbidden City Chamber Orchestra (Beijing), Klangforum Wien (Vienna), Royal String Quartet (Warsaw), Aviva Endean (Melbourne), International Contemporary Ensemble (New York), Musiques Nouvelles (Brussels) amongst others. He received many awards and nominations including IMPLUS International Composition Competition in Graz and the Passport Award for classical music of the Polityka weekly. In 2015 a theatre/choir piece with Blecharz’s music Mutter Courage und ihre Hunden directed by Marta Górnicka, and commissioned by Staadtstheater Bruswick was acclaimed as one of the best 60 performances in Germany. Since 2012 he has been curating the Instalakcje music festival at Warsaw’s Nowy Theatre, featuring non-concert music.  read more

Katarzyna Krakowiak - an artist who creates sculptures, performances, objects, compositions and sound installations that investigate languages used to describe architecture. She presents her work in sound and architecture, including ’Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers’ from the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012, where she installed hidden speakers in the walls and floor of the Polish Pavilion. Exploring the borders of architecture, Krakowiak builds large-scale installations based on existing structures. She now focuses on formulating the concept of architecture in linguistic categories – as an imperfective verb and a space of becoming, which appears in different ways depending on its function, as well as on the sonic manifestations of human-nonhuman relationships. The aim of this artist's work is to create an acoustic environment that allows viewers-listeners to become part of a work of art and get acquainted with architecture at the sound level. Katarzyna Krakowiak explains how she creates sculptures, performances, objects, compositions and sound installations that explore the languages used to describe architecture.  read more

Kyoka - a Japan-born and Berlin-based, electronic producer, DJ, installation artist and field recorder, with an extraordinary capacity to explore and experiment with her pioneer type of approach to sound for her chaotic and direct musical approach and a heavy-rough sound, resulting in a broken pop-beat with experimental yet danceable rhythms. Kyoka is the first solo female artist signed to what it used to be iconic German experimental label Raster-Noton (posteriorly split into raster-media and NOTON), home to artists like Alva Noto (a.k.a. Carsten Nicolai), Byetone, Frank Bretschneider, Ryuichi Sakamoto, William Basinski and Ryoji Ikeda. read more

Karolina Łebek - Polish artist based in London, investigating the phenomenon of the sacred, with particular interest in object-oriented ontology and animism. Exploring themes of shame, sexuality, ritual and myth, it pivots around a de-hierarchicalisation of “things”and sentience. Through desire to capture the effect of memory, Karolin expresses subtle and perturbing worlds and building my own lexicon of symbolic language which is populated by unspoken narratives, haunting material mysteries and taboo consciousnesses.

Konrad Smoleński - a multimedia artist working in sound, video, installation, and performance. His works combine punk rock aesthetics with the precision that is characteristic of minimalism. Through the use of sound objects that are plucked directly from popular culture or of his own creation, Smoleński examines the effects of free-flowing energy. This is evident in works where a sound signal is manipulated live and/or is forced into an interaction with the audience. By exploring the possibilities of electricity, sound waves, and PA systems, he manipulates the meanings that are usually attributed to objects connected with rock music and contemporary art culture. Winner of the Views 2011 – Deutsche Bank Foundation Award. The artist represented Poland at the 55th Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition at the Polish Pavilion (2013). He is the leader of the BNNT sound performance project and co-founder of the PENERSTWO artistic collective. His works are held in the following collections: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Ludwig Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, Museum of Art, Łódź, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. read more

A very special thanks to Michele Braga for providing technical support and his in-kind collaboration on this project.