Part of a collection project in progress, the exhibition SonicTime, speech/sound/silence brings together fifty five works from the Museum’s collection, which focus on language, sound, music and silence as their common matrix.
They are video/sound/multimedia installations, single channel video, sound sculptures, drawings, net artworks, sound cd, sound books and performances of the last four decades, which constitute different and heterogenous acoustic forms of contemporary art, in their literal or/and metaphoric version, of older and younger artists coming from diverse artistic backgrounds.
From the synesthesia of visual music to the communicative state of sound sculpture and poetry, and from the voice-centered experimentations of video art and electronic music to the hybrid narration of digital literature and sound art, the works in the exhibition reveal the acoustic materiality of language and music over the dominant visual image. Opening up a wide space of inter-artistic and transmedial translation, they transcend discernable boundaries, penetrate modes and codes of others, are transcripted and disguised, are deconstructed and resignified, they claim the right to contemporaneity, they redefine themselves. They ask for our participation through the bridging of listening, reading, understanding and critically interpreting, an equally translatory process which expands the networks of interaction of the aesthetic experience.
The exhibition SonicTime was designed as a contemplative and poetic promenade through sounds and silences, the translation and the untranslatable of human situation. As words that emerge from the depths of water, the sounds are mirrored in whiteness and light. The first speech is listened to with unspoken thoughts. The recording of the sound of things with synestheses that do not reach hearing.
The double voicing as listening experience opens us up to identification, engagement, attentiveness….
Anna Kafetsi
Excerpt from the official catalogue
Danae Stratou participated in the exhibition with a new work: ICESONGS2 created in collaboration with Vasilis Kountouris in 2012. ICESONGS2 comprises a video & sound installation which emerged from the site-specific installation ICESONGS created by Danae Stratou and presented at La Verriere, the exhibition space of the Fondation d’ Enterprise Hermes, in Brussels in 2010.