Songs for the City | Capilano University | September 25

Capilano University Studio Art Gallery

Studio Art Building

2055 Purcell Way, North Vancouver

Mon-Fri 9-4

Songs for the City is Gabriel Saloman’s first solo exhibition of sound arts in Canada. It features an expanded consideration of sound as a social practice that mediates our contested relationship with the city. Each of these works speaks to how the human voice claims a stake in public space and in doing so creates that space.

Songs for Sick Buildings combines photographic documentation and raw field recordings of individuals and groups singing to “sick” buildings in the hopes of effecting some form of healing. For residents of cities, the fabric of our everyday lives is formed by the architecture that surrounds us. How can we move beyond alienation and isolation and see the City as a place alive with history and presence. Songs for Sick Buildings is not only an invitation to these artists to reclaim their public space with the power of their voices, but to everyone, everywhere.

Taking as its inspiration Slavoj Žižek’s October 9, 2011 speech at Zuccotti Park in New York and the “people’s mic” whcih broadcasted it to those who were at Occupy Wall Street’s open forum, Songs for Žižek imagines his words as a spell attempting to lift a curse. Equal parts score, instructional, concrete poetry and participatory artwork, it is also an easily reproducible and distributable text which can be printed, posted and plastered where ever it is needed.

A sound work that includes video and text, Olympic Bardo considers the uncanny similarity between the found sound of the city of Vancouver, BC during the minutes immediately before and after Team Canada won the gold medal in Ice Hockey during the 2010 Winter Olympics and the deep and massive drones of Tibetan horns calling monks to meditation. It asks the question of what we should make of things were this NOT a coincidence but in fact an event precipitated by the riots in Tibet and its occupied territories in China, riots which have found their mimesis in the streets of Vancouver during and after the Winter Olympics, as well as London, the host of 2012′s Summer Olympics. Olympic Bardo proposes that what we are hearing is the sound of the invitation to an emanation of Kali, a goddess of destruction and transformation who’s work seems to be playing out all over the world in unexpected ways.