‘Silence’:
Winter 2010 Online Quarterly
arteeast.org/pages/artenews/Silence
ArteEast invites you to celebrate the launch of this issue on December 14, 2010 6:30 p.m. at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP)1040 Metropolitan Avenue
Brooklyn, New York, 11211 (L train to Grand Street)
Presentations by
Aslihan Demirtas (Architect, New York)
Regine Basha (Curator, New York)
Cevdet Erek (Artist, Istanbul)
Micah Silver (Artist, Cambridge, MA)
Moderated by Hakan Topal (Artist, xurban_collective)
ArteEast is pleased to announce the launch of the Winter 2010 edition of its online quarterly journal, featuring guest editor Hakan Topal‘s issue Silence. With contributions by Defne Ayas, Anne Barlow, Regine Basha, Dan Cameron, Aslihan Demirtas, Cevdet Erek, Tony Chakar and Micah Silver, ArteEast will kick off this issue on December 14, 2010 at 6:30 p.m. with a panel discussion by a number of the featured contributors at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP).
In the pages of the quarterly the authors discuss the possibilities and limitations of the condition of silence by examining its presence in art and music across a number of global socio-political contexts. Several authors tackle the concatenation of sound, history and nation, working towards an understanding of the dynamics and power of silence. Defne Ayas discusses the recently realized Blind Dates curatorial project, which aimed to outline the challenges of engaging issues fraught with the multi-layered histories of the Anatolian landscape and its overlapping nationalized contexts. Aslihan Demirtas, who took part in the Blind Dates project, discusses the ancient Armenian city Ani—a charged historical site that reflects the tensions between contemporary Armenia and Turkey. Meanwhile, Anne Barlow considers the absence of specific ‘cultural indicators’ in Antarctica as a means to reveal the potential for a non-nationalized space.
The next group of essays offer a more self-reflective look at silence, working through personal narratives and collective memory. Regine Basha‘s video essay navigates YouTube videos to trace instances of the song ‘Fog il Nakhal’ as it transforms through various voices and instruments. Similarly, Tony Chakar knits together religious and literary sources to form a personal narrative, duly influenced by his experience of his home city of Beirut. Dan Cameron directs our attention to various works that activate our auditory senses by visually addressing our collective memories; by giving a philosophical account of the notion of sound-scape and its relation to our bodies, he points to its intrinsic importance in the acts of listening and thinking.
The remaining artists in Silence take on the mechanics of sound and its relationship to the body and performance: Micah Silver weaves through the history of music to offer viewers a rich chronicle of silence in sound-based practices, while Cevdet Erek addresses tinnitus, the perception of a ringing noise in the ear that often occurs after extreme exposure to a loud sound. Erek draws our attention to the creative possibilities of tinnitus and provides various sound tracks of his recent work to accompany his text. Together, the writers, artists and curators in this edition of the quarterly frame silence as a rich terrain in which questions of subjectivity, memory and nationalism are probed and explored.
Also featured at ArteEast Online:
Gen70, curated by Kristine Khouri with profiles of Basim Magdy and Manal Al Dowayan
Shahadat, curated by Alex Ortiz, featuring “Him, Me and Muhammad Ali”, a short story by Randa Jarrar
Virtual Gallery: “how to make (nice) things happen” Curated by Mirene Arsanios
