Soundshapes – In Between Frequencies

Janine Jembere: endurance – a sound shower

18 October 2023 to 14 January 2024

Janine Jembere conceived a new work for Soundshapes – In Between Frequencies: Volume I. It consists of phrases that are uplifting, encouraging and empowering, collected by Jembere from friends and colleagues in different languages. This collectively authored, multilingual piece tackles language in its capacity to build relations amongst us, going far beyond one’s individual ability to decipher the meaning of words.

Jembere recorded the phrases in her own voice. Although making the effort to pronounce the words appropriately, her pronunciation is broken in many cases. For Jembere, this “broken pronunciation” raises questions around the colonial and imperial domination of language as well as the imbalance between those who speak in their mother tongue and those who speak a language learned later in life.       

Kapwani Kiwanga: 500ft

31 July to 16 October 2023

How does architecture control the physical movement and psychological state of humans? In her sound piece 500ft, Kapwani Kiwanga puts different disciplinary tools of built environments and colonial strategies of separation into relation. Drawing from her research into public institutions such as hospitals, prisons and urban spaces, the artist traces how disciplinary architectures travel and mutate across times and geographies. A recurring motif is the way in which the interior is shaped in response to the exterior in an effort to govern human behaviour and nature. The title of the work refers to the minimum distance between areas designated for the local population and those for European settlers in the French colonies, defined during the International Conference on Colonial Urbanism (Paris, 1931).

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