Exhibition: Sonic Minds: Mnemonic Passages
Venue: urban and natural paths in the city of Ioannina, Greece
Dates: Opening Oct 11, Duration: (ongoing)

Sonic Minds: Mnemonic Passages poster programme – download in PDF:
https://bowb.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/SONIC-MINDS-POSTER.pdf

“Οne with the pleasure inherent in speech – a pleasure that, being a part of the oral message, lives and dies with the discourse that gave rise to it.”
Jean-Pierre Vernant

Curatorial text

‘Sonic Minds: Mnemonic Passages’ is an immaterial, walking sound exhibition that can be explored through wandering along urban and natural paths within the city of Ioannina, with the use of a mobile application. By “entering” the exhibition, the audience turns into sonic flaneurs able to explore an invisible aural artwork, with the use of their personal smartphones.

The exhibition explores the relation of sound and memory as a collective and cultural expression, through sound art and oral history. Sonic Minds examines concepts as orality, aural memory and technical reproducibility, in connection to tradition and ecosophy. What are the sonic and mnemonic interpretations of the collective human experience? How is sound expressing and connecting past and present in the imaginary of a community? How is conceptual sound –the sound we hear in our thoughts– being interpreted and recorded by stirring up memories and emotions?

Read the full curatorial text here

Lia Dimou

Presented artists:

1. Dimitris Karageorgos, Greece

Dimitris Karageorgos has many years of music studies and extensive experience in music production as well as documentation and research of traditional music. He composes electroacoustic music and compositions for mixed music groups in which he often participates. Currently he performs with PanNik Project and with inSTUMENTAL. He is a member of the Association of Greek Composers of Electroacoustic Music (HELMCA) and the Hellenic Society of Acoustic Ecology (HSAE).

2. Haris Sahacic (from CRVENA Cultural Organisation, info separately below),  Bosnia and Herzegovina

He was born in Sarajevo and graduated from the “Media Design” direction at the Weimar Art and Design Department of Fine Arts. He is the author of numerous radio shows, radio dramas, radio art concepts, art critics and poetry books in the German and Bosnian languages. In the course of his career he receives from Bauhaus University Weimar and Hans Böckler Foundation scholarship for studies. Today he is a member of the Bauhaus.fm radio initiative and works as Head of Administration and Radio of the Crvena Association of Culture and Art.
CRVENA
(the official name: Association for Culture and CRVENA) is a left-wing feminist organization from Sarajevo. Its work encompasses artistic, research, educational and political practices, and is focused on creating and maintaining the conditions for a progressive social change through the development of self-management capacities, critical and imaginary horizons, and organizational relationships and capabilities in society. According to the last systematization (interests, wishes and orientations) they work on the crossing of four transversal and longitudinally related problem fields defined by the relations and oppositions of art and politics, work and leisure, women and society, and city and nature. The organization was established in 2010. CRVENA was founded by a group of friends with the aim of generating energy and impulses through culture, which will lead to the dynamization of other spheres of life and everyday life in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

3. Post Global Recordings (Toni Dimitrov, Martin Greorgievski), North Macedonia

Post global recordings is platform for music and sound focused on ambient, drone, field recordings, post classical and other related aesthetic forms, which aim is to promote mainly new artists with similar approach to music and life.
Sound_00 known as Toni Dimitrov and Lefterna known as Martin Greorgievski have been curving their way into the new experimental music scene with their solo engagement, but also with lots of collaborative releases under their belt. Exploring the dynamics of minimum Vs. maximum, in terms and meanings of noise Vs. drone, they are searching their own way of merging magical meanings and esoteric inspiration with a certain styles of music, such as ambient and long-form drone explorations. Their joint project has managed to achieve and release a number of different EP-s for diverse labels, like Ostroga, Etched Traumas, Petroglyph Music and post global.

4. Shaan (Jovana Ivanac), Serbia

Shaan is an experimental project of Jovana Ivanac, which started in 2014, and is focused on improvised hardware live electronics. Her arrangements vary from pure drone to complex and ever-morphing polyrhythmic structures. The main factor on which they depend is intuition. Her music is made for the moment, for a specific place and time, and it deeply depends on their atmosphere. Poetry and storytelling are also important factors of her expression, inseparable from sound. She released a debut album “Notes from a peculiar time in space” for Modern Tapes label in February 2018, and is now working on collaborations, which should be released in the following months.

5. Katalin Ladik, Serbia

Katalin Ladik was born in Yugoslavia, a Hungarian poet, artist, actor and visual artist. She began her career in the early 1960s, through which she collaborated with the Bosch + Bosch art group. He began the experimental artistic practices and the self-explanatory interpretation of the “genus self” on the borders of the intercultural territories of Serbia and Hungary. Her oeuvre includes written, sound and visual poetry; the visual arts, concept photography, performance art; happenings; mail art; experimental music; theatre, film and radio plays. The majority of her performances are in between performance art and theatre. She presents her sound poetry accompanied by body art actions, vocal and gesticular improvisation. Descent into the underworld – a well known motif in the world literature, it is the recurring, basic theme of her performative practice. Descent into the world of barcodes and QR codes is the subject of her emblematic multimedia performance, Alice in Codland (2012-2018). Descent into the secrets of objets trouvés, her favorite integrated circuits found in the rubbish („ready-made objects”) is a recurring motif of her sound art. Descent into the depth of many-faceted folk traditions from all over the world, into the world of fairy tales that appeal to collective anxiety dreams and reflect general inner conflicts and the possibility of solutions is the recurring theme of her „live performed” collage-scores. Ladik’s works of art are in collections of major international museums, such as MoMa, Tate Gallery, the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest.

6. Kino Pleme, Serbia

Kino pleme is a audio-visual initiative and analog film lab based in Belgrade, Serbia. We produced several films on 8mm and 16mm, managed several workshops and organized over forty Live Soundtrack events, with numerous entries from around the world, focusing on rarely seen and recently rediscovered works of short experimental cinema and animation around the globe. Along with expanded cinema, we are exploring different facets of (local) electronic, ambient and electro-acoustic music, already historically linked to providing scores to some of the more forward thinking works of cinema, and connecting some of these micro-managed, and less visible scenes into a larger whole.

7. Masturbeator (Adrija Krivokapic), Montenegro

Masturbeator (name: Andrija Krivokapic) is audio/visual artist from Bar, Montenegro. Since 2003. he produced several hip hop albums under ‘Dvorska Luda’ alias. As Masturbeator he continues to make uncompromising music and visuals. He is one of the founders of Underground Alliance Records, label that released music from authors from ex Yugoslav region.

8. Donika Rudi, Kosovo

Donika Rudi (1982) is a Kosovar composer specialized in acousmatic, electroacoustic, and instrumental music. She obtained two degrees in composition at Geneva Music Conservatorium in the fields of instrumental and electroacoustic music. She finished post-graduate composition studies at the Royal Conservatorium of Mons, Belgium. Some of her most important works are Contemporary Ballet “Life in Slow Motion”, which was premiered at the National Theatre in Prishtina; “Sophie’s World” acousmatic piece and “Aura I” for violin, viola, mezzosoprano, soprano, percussions & electronics. Since 2010 she is the member of FEBEME – BEFEM (Fédération belge de musique électroacoustique) in Belgium and a member of CEC (Canadian Electroacoustic Comunity). Also, she is Director of Prishtina International Music Festival – ReMusica, since 2010, and lecturer at the University of Pristina, Music Department.

9. Oral History, Kosovo
The Kosovo Oral History Initiative is a collective of researchers of different generations, nationalities and competences, whose mission is to record life stories that intersect with the broader history of Kosovo and world events. The Initiative was born in the summer of 2012 from a collaboration between the Kosova Women’s Network (Pristina) and The New School for Public Engagement (NY), having a common goal; to realize a dream we had shared for a long time: rescue from oblivion the voices of people – leaders and ordinary people – that Kosovo’s changeable official histories had condemned to amnesia. We wanted to go beyond the narratives of victimization and the straightjacket of group thinking. We were interested in recovering the whole life experience of individuals. With support from private donors and volunteers, we interviewed, with the result that the oral history initiative later became an independent organization and began to develop broader research topics.

10. Christopher King & Long Gone Productions USA

Christopher King is a Grammy Award-winning musical producer, musicologist and 78-speed Grammy recorder fanatic. He specializes in American pre-war American music (with emphasis on Cajun) and various musicals in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Long Gone Sound Productions began in 1999. In his book “Lives of Epirus: An Odyssey in the Oldest Saved European Folk Music”, he finds a unique kind of music back to the roots of the music itself.

11. Nenad Vujic, Serbia

Nenad Vujić was born in Belgrade. He founded the “A Hogon’s Industrial Guide”, an archival-research platform with the aim to re-evaluate marginal trends in Yugoslav popular culture. A few years later he edited the ”Hometaping in Self-Management” retrospective LP compilation, dedicated to Yugoslav 1980s cassette experimentalism. He created “Logografija zvuka”, a music programme at the Centre for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade, with guests Cédric Fermont (Berlin) and Bratko Bibič (Ljubljana). He is the organizer of many concerts, bringing to Belgrade musicians from Russia, Italy and Lebanon among others. He is interested in industrial culture, electronic music, cassette experimentalism, experimental film, structuralist film and video art.