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In this episode we travel to the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi and dive into its diverse sounds, noises, and artistic practices. We visit three female sound artists who talk about listening despite noise pollution, changing soundscapes through the past decades, how they collaborate with their peers, and how they cope with ongoing gender inequalities. Producer’s Note What does it mean to be a part of a community? A citizen of a city? Can the streets mimic our veins? Can the coursing thoroughfares inflate as our lungs might, heaving in the rarefied schemata the alleys and overpasses trace? And what of the city’s pulse, the urban throb, the endless effusive clash of chaotic purity – can the indefatigable wash of noise alter our perception, or indeed, shape our ability to perceive? And what of the layers beyond that – the food, the songs, the sayings, the spices, the incense burning in the pagodas, the fish rotting on the shores of the lake, the uncles laughing and smiling, the meanings buried in simple actions. Can we define an essence that allows us to explain what our city means to us? Can we distill it? Should we? Hanoi has been shaped by waves of culture, the ripples are still ebbing back and forth as the water is yet to clear. Beneath the surface strong undercurrents play and dance, drawing the daring deeper into its surfeit of heart. In this podcast episode, you will hear from three cultural creators who call this grumbling behemoth their home. What drives them? What moves them? What power do they draw from this shining capital, perched amidst lakes and mountainous regions, filled with hope and eager to alter expectations?, https://www.librarystack.org/hanoi-undercurrents/?ref=unknown

Art functions as a perception prism, aiming to divert and change how we experience our world. As psychedelics take root in white America, an appropriation shift occurs. From meditating with paintings, to representations of altered states, we probe the nature of the relationship of the artist with themselves and with the viewer and finally between art and our senses., https://www.librarystack.org/art-as-trance-lucy-bull-and-psychedelic-countercultures/?ref=unknown

From a young age, Betye Saar collected objects as a form of ritual, to hone their energy and activate their spirit. To protect and potentialize them. Today’s episode explores ritual as a methodology for healing and power. From the ritualization of Betye Saar’s installation sites to the reclamation of the Black body by Krista Franklin we follow and deconstruct the Brookes Ship., https://www.librarystack.org/rituals-of-transformation-betye-saar-and-black-feminist-art/?ref=unknown

Stories of Friendship—episode fifteen of The Tale and the Tongue series—emerged from a conversation with the constellating artist-duo and friends Tara Njála Ingvarsdóttir and Silfrun Una Guðlaugsdóttir with Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of The Tale and the Tongue podcast series. Sonia Fernández Pan first met Tara Njála Ingvarsdóttir and Silfrun Una Guðlaugsdóttir on their way to LungA School in Seyðisfjörður, Island, where they were invited to lead two workshops. Seeing them being dressed alike, giving two different characters to the same piece of clothing, gave a glimpse to something that is very present in their work as artists: the way in which everyday life and art can become friends, thanks to playful gestures and storytelling stimuli. Sonia Fernández Pan proposed them a little play: to tell her separately about a memory of their friendship. Tara Njála Ingvarsdóttir would tell the story of the little bugs, and Silla Una Guðlaugsdóttir would share past situations and present emotions that make friendship a living home. When asked about their reasons for studying art, both agreed that art is a space where it is possible to be various things at the same time. The artist becomes a shape shifter, a temporary identity, also the excuse for a story with many other characters. This way of doing things has enabled them to become waterproof gallerists, heads of a company providing apology support, emotional dinner party hosts, hairdressers for naughty hairstyles, or bird-shaped instrument players. Recently they got married in blue, celebrating their friendship and their constellating life together. The wedding included a contract in which they signed a piece of advice that someone gave them: to put friendship first. Their friendship wedding was officiated by the Icelandic Love Corporation, and sweetened by the world’s largest cake and intimate talks at night. Performance as an artistic device is a medium that not only allows the, https://www.librarystack.org/tale-and-the-tongue-stories-of-friendship-the/?ref=unknown

Not knowing how a dead language sounded—episode seventeen of The Tale and the Tongue series—follows a conversation with multi-media producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ, and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label Terre Thaemlitz, and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series. The title of this podcast is inspired by a comment that appeared during the meeting with Terre Thaemlitz. She proposed a future in which aspects of the past are unknown as a critical gesture towards the ongoing and growing demand for visibility and preservation of mainstream, but not only, archival systems. Like any other medium, archives and documents produce ideology and are produced by ideology. Following more of Terre Thaemlitz’s comments, this podcast conversation is also not excluded from how criticism of the system is part of the system. Because, as he says, analysis and artistic work is often confused with political organisation. The relational dynamics of gender also emerged in this conversation with Terre Thaemlitz. Like Brigitte Vasallo—author, activist and former guest of the Promise No Promises! podcast series, episode 27 The Monogamy of the System—he is very nuanced about the widespread belief that removing gender from language removes its impact on social realities. On the current situation of gender pronouns, Sonia Fernández Pan also shared with Terre Thaemlitz her thoughts on other uses for the pronoun “they.” Sometimes Sonia Fernández Pan perceives in this pronoun a chance to imply the plurality of the self: “they” in relation to the “I” and not so much to the “she” or “he.” We are often asked to speak in key words that make us less complex than we are. Identity as a comfort zone or final destination contradicts the identity discomfort of so many lives. Being different like others is not the same as being different from others., https://www.librarystack.org/tale-and-the-tongue-not-knowing-how-a-dead-language-sounded-the/?ref=unknown

Etel Adnan’s art practice exists outside of traditional notions of time and spaces. She paints and writes a broader objective view of the cosmos all while wrestling with the everyday. Today’s episode explodes out of time and follows repetition and meditation rituals as anchors for the therapeutic process. From letting go of the written word, to painting, to reclaiming a voice amid the chaos of war, we look at Etel Adnan., https://www.librarystack.org/a-lightning-stroke-the-poetic-vision-of-etel-adnan/?ref=unknown

Dorothee Richter’s argument understands curating or the curatorial not as a philosophical concept but as a practice that is deeply involved in the politics of display, politics of site, politics of transfer and translation, and regimes of visibility. It is based on a concept of critical research that takes as its starting point the investigation of what is often the overly simplistic understanding of the curator as a new agent in the fields of art and culture. Richter understands the curatorial as a multi-authored approach to the production of meaning, which is intrinsically linked to transformations of contemporary societies, the reorganisation of labour, cultural policies, politics of inclusion/exclusion, and issues posed by points of intersection. Curatorial practice and theory have been developed in the context of cultural analysis, theories of power, and theories of communities based on feminist, queer, postcolonial, ecological, post-Marxist and other political and emancipatory positions. Many of these positions emerge out of political struggles or social movements. Ideally, curatorial knowledge production can be seen as a space for the negotiation of social, political, cultural, and economic conflicts. It understands curating as agency from which new constellations emerge. These could be represented in the format of an exhibition but equally in other forms of meaning production through a context-related media conglomeration, which involves a critical review of contemporary curatorial practices and theories. By engaging with these trajectories, the conditions and the foundations of knowledge production in the curatorial field become the subject of critical research leading to their re-positioning., https://www.librarystack.org/curating-politics-of-display-politics-of-site-politics-of-transfer-and-translation-politics-of-knowledge-production/?ref=unknown

Staying with the wonder—episode sixteen of The Tale and the Tongue series—is created through an audio recording exchange by artist Daniela Medina Poch and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series. Dear Daniela, I have been collecting bottle caps these days to keep bringing the sea closer to this marshy city. Yesterday I brought back several from a long journey to reach a lake, as well as some strange, very hard mushrooms growing on the trunks of some trees. Curiosity makes us eavesdrop and intrusive, diverts us from the straight and narrow, makes us perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary, even makes us change our minds. Do you think curiosity is a crossing point between seeking and finding? I feel it is an indispensable attitude to stay with the wonder, an idea of yours that is much more than an idea. It is perhaps a way of being in the world, an unstable position that makes and unmakes given realities. Someone told me that curiosity was a type of youth. And I think that if you stay with the wonder, you age youthfully. In starting to write this letter, which is for you, but also for anyone who wants to listen to us through your voice, I was trying to recall things I said to you in my voice notes but not doing so keeps the secret. However, it is not the mystery of my stories that is important here, but the possibility of not telling something or of telling it half-heartedly. Not knowing everything stops being uncomfortable and becomes a way to stay with the wonder. I stop here, a bit suddenly. A summer storm has just started. Perhaps these drops bring to Berlin the waters of so many rivers that are important to you. See you in the future to share flavors, wishes and stories. In the meantime, enjoy the unknown very much. Yours, Sonia, https://www.librarystack.org/tale-and-the-tongue-staying-with-the-wonder-the/?ref=unknown

This episode features an interview with Sháńdíín Brown (Diné), continuing our series talking to participants in the Momus residency “Estuaries: An International Indigenous Art Criticism Residency” co-hosted with Forge Project. Lauren Wetmore talks to Sháńdíín Brown, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and the first Henry Luce Curatorial Fellow for Native American Art at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, about two very different texts written almost a century apart: Laura Tohe’s “There is No Word for Feminism in My Language” (2000) and Uriah S. Hollister’s “The Navajo and His Blanket” (1903). Brown speaks about these two texts in the context of the exhibition she has curated Diné Textiles: Nizhónígo Hadadít’eh (They Are Beautifully Dressed), which opens in early September at the RISD Museum. In highlighting the important role of women in Navajo culture, and Brown’s own work as a facilitator of that culture, she speaks against racist writing about Indigenous art: “When someone so boldly says ‘the Navajos are going to go extinct,’” Brown says of Hollister’s text, “you’re like, me being here, having Native people in museums, having Native people invited to be collaborators, and working in art history is a big deal.”, https://www.librarystack.org/nizhonigo-hadaditeh/?ref=unknown

Painting Photography Painting is the essential first collection of essays by critic and theorist Carol Armstrong, bringing together writings encompassing the many inflection points of her academic work, including French painting, early photography, feminist theory, and the representation of women and gender in the visual arts. In the book’s titular essay, Armstrong asks of Ellen Gallagher’s 2008 painting An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity, which depicts a barely-visible sea creature created out of ink, graphite, oil, varnish, and variously sliced paper, ‘in what sense is this a painting exactly?’ This enquiry into the very essence of the medium provides a thread that runs throughout the book’s wide-ranging essays and ties together a variety of works on paper ‘inscribed, drawn, printed, photographed, and variously pierced and punctured’. Considering these various works, Painting Photography Painting provides a compelling path through Armstrong’s decades of writing, weaving together figures from across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Cézanne, Ellen Gallagher, Georges Seurat, Julia Margaret Cameron, Tina Modotti, and Diane Arbus in a single, illuminating volume., https://www.librarystack.org/painting-photography-painting-selected-essays/?ref=unknown

The following conversation between Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eleonora Luccarini, and myself occurred via Zoom on Monday, 24 July, 2023, at 13:00 San Francisco/16:00 Hudson/22:00 Amsterdam. This is the sixth publication of Version Space, a series of pamphlets transcribing conversations among artists and graduate students in visual art regarding Artificial Intelligence and related topics, originally produced in collaboration with Library Stack and funded by the Artistic Research program of the Sandberg Instituut, where I was a research fellow in the Department of Fine Arts for the academic years 2018–19 and 2019–20, with additional support from KAJE, an artist-run institution in Brooklyn, New York, where I was a 2023 Think Tank resident. The conversations take place via videoconference, are recorded, transcribed by an AI, then edited for clarity by humans, including myself and the participants. The series title is borrowed from a machine learning framework conceived in the 1980s as a technique for identifying a range of possibilities in the overlap between maximally general and maximally specific hypotheses., https://www.librarystack.org/version-space-lynn-hershman-leeson-in-conversation-with-eleonora-luccarini/?ref=unknown

We Know What Remains Unsaid / Tout ce qu’on tait on sait is the second volume of a series of publications by Wages For Wages Against collective, acting for better work conditions in the visual arts and against all forms of discrimination. This edition presents research on the mechanisms of invisibilisation of precarious realities and activist knowledges. It investigates what our silences reveal. By giving a voice to several researchers, activists and collectives, this volume presents unsaid words, forgotten stories, invisible struggles and thus makes possible the construction of alternative common narratives., https://www.librarystack.org/we-know-what-remains-unsaid/?ref=unknown

You Never Know What You Are Creating Space For—episode 14 of the Tale and the Tongue series—arises from a conversation with Teesa Bahana, the director of 32° East, an independent non-profit organisation focused on supporting, creating, and exploring contemporary art in Uganda, and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of the Tale and the Tongue podcast series. Music would appear at the beginning of their conversation, sharing together impressions of music’s sensory ability to touch our emotions by bodily listening. The sensory dimension is something that music shares with artistic practices. However, there is a tendency to privilege its conceptual dimension, to locate art in the mind and not in the entire body. Being inspired by talking to other people is a kind of gift we receive, often without looking for it. In friendly conversations, ideas often come up that help us to shape or follow directions. They are part of a network that includes serendipities, spontaneity, and the pleasure in encountering each other. To borrow Teesa Bahana’s words, the possibility of creating a community involves a common language and knowing how to relate to each other across differences. Another common term in the art context is “professional.” It refers to a way of doing or not doing, but it is also an ideological subject with different, sometimes contradictory, perspectives. As Teesa Bahana points out, the critique of the term must take into account who is professional by default and who is not, who can ignore prescribed conventions and who cannot. The title of this podcast, You Never Know What You Are Creating Space For, is inspired by a comment from Teesa Bahana during the conversation that brings up unintentional yet essential situations when working: making space for the unexpected and paying attention to things that happen and we can sense without planning them., https://www.librarystack.org/tale-and-the-tongue-you-never-know-what-you-are-creating-space-for-the/?ref=unknown

An archive by artist Elisabeth Eberle with findings on the unequal gender relations in art 2010 – 2021 with text contributions by Prof. Dorothee Richter, ZHdK, Nina Schedlmayer, Vienna, Nathalie Killias and Arathy Pathmanathan published in the art news­letter of the city of Zurich, quoted reader comments on a debate in Tages­Anzeiger and swissinfo, a pho­tographic self­-portrait by Anne Marie Jehle from the 1980s, photos by Zoe Tempest, Elisabeth Eberle, with explanations of the illustrations and findings from the archive, designed by Pauline Koch and published by onCurating, Zurich., https://www.librarystack.org/mind-the-gap/?ref=unknown

In this episode, we speak with artist Marwa Arsanios about her practice, documenta fifteen, feminism, and the possibility of reshaping the political potential of art. She talks to us about her ongoing project, Who Is Afraid of Ideology?, which Arsanios did as part of documenta fifteen. In this project, she explores through collaboration the possibility of communizing land and its practical, legal, and geological connotations. Furthermore, we discuss the aftermath of documenta fifteen and its problems. We also get to know about the origins of the title and the ideological differences in regards to feminism in Beirut in the last decade., https://www.librarystack.org/who-is-afraid-of-documenta-fifteen/?ref=unknown

Today we are visiting with the one and only Shirin Neshat. If you’ve ever taken an art history class that covers video art, photography, international cinema, or for that matter contemporary opera, you’ve definitely seen Shirin’s work. Since her debut exhibition in 1993 at Franklin Furnace, Shirn’s work has offered a deeply personal yet universal perspective on womanhood, power, corruption, trauma, and the female body as the battleground of social and political manipulation. All of this in Shirin’s work is of course informed very much by her experience as an Iranian immigrant who moved to the US at age seventeen just prior to the revolution and has lived in exile ever since. Her latest exhibition at Gladstone Gallery titled The Fury features new works including a photo series and a large video installation that hearkens all the way back to her iconic 1998 video installation Turbulent. We discuss all this and more, as well as Shirin’s perspective on the ongoing protests and movement in Iran sparked by the death of Masha Amini — which of course is deeply related to the themes that have been present in Shirin’s work for decades., https://www.librarystack.org/shirin-neshat/?ref=unknown

Acaye Kerunen is an artist, performer, storyteller, writer, and activist based in Kampala, Uganda. She graduated with a BSc in Mass Communication from the Islamic University in Uganda, Mbale. Her installation works—featuring hand stitching, appending, knotting, and weaving—are often made with local craftswomen, querying the line between fine art and craft, and centering methodologies of performance, collaboration, social work, and environmental consciousness., https://www.librarystack.org/songs-to-sound-worlds-names/?ref=unknown

To Move a Conversation, is the thirteenth episode of The Tale and the Tongue series. It is a very special one—created through an audio recording exchange over months by artist Luz Broto and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of The Tale and the Tongue podcast series. “Dear Luz, I am writing to you from my room in Berlin, where the first prominent sun of the year amuses itself by appearing and disappearing. A window that opens becomes a door. A door for a breath of fresh air and an internal change of scenery, as in my case. I kept listening to you, this time with the whole conversation in my ears, feeling two sources of light: that of sun and yours. I find it very telling that your name in Spanish means light. Barcelona’s nights have always been bright for me. And there are places where darkness goes beyond night, reaching into long summer days. As I also told you, snow and ice teach you that walking in a straight line can be very dangerous. You can be very clear about a direction to follow, but not about its path. Something like that happens to me with this letter I am writing to you after our spoken letters. We gave it a name: “moving a conversation.” And we came up with a little method: to move around spaces that were related to your projects. You in Barcelona, me in Berlin. I think we found a way to go back to the past by walking into the future. Thank you very much my dear, for moving me around, for taking me to so many places elsewhere, for making space for me among your words.”, https://www.librarystack.org/tale-and-the-tongue-to-move-a-conversation-the/?ref=unknown

Bani Abidi was born in Karachi, Pakistan. She studied painting and printmaking at the National College of Arts, in Lahore, and later attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work addresses, in part, forms of nationalism amid the Indian-Pakistani conflict and the violent legacy of partition., https://www.librarystack.org/songs-to-sound-worlds-inheritance/?ref=unknown

I Eat Here by Tessa Mars is the first episode of the new podcast series Songs to Sound Worlds, Stories to Rewrite Them: On Gender, Storytelling, and Myth, based on the autumn 2022 symposium with the same title. Tessa Mars was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In her painting and performance practice she proposes storytelling and image-making as transformative strategies for survival, resistance, and healing. Her work is centered around Tessalines, her hybrid alter ego based on the leader of the Haitian revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines; through her, Mars investigates gender, history, tradition, and narrative. The podcast series Songs to Sound Worlds, Stories to Rewrite Them: On Gender, Storytelling, and Myth emerges from the autumn 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. It features talks and performances by Jumana Emil Abboud, Bani Abidi, Christian Campbell, Astrit Ismaili, Acaye Kerunen, Tessa Mars, and Kara Springer. To critically and virtuosically address the world from mythic and counterhegemonic positions means to face colonial histories and neocolonial realities, as well as their denial of ancestral and speculative ways of perceiving and shaping that very world. The symposium Songs to Sound Worlds was devoted to artists and thinkers whose work addresses the importance of retelling and reinterpreting stories and myths that regard identity and gender with all their ecological and spectral entanglements intact. Such myths often transcend colonial binaries, offering life-generating languages that employ fiction and fantasy, poetry and song, which predate the systems imposed by hetero-modernity and its patriarchization of our most foundational stories., https://www.librarystack.org/songs-to-sound-worlds-i-eat-here/?ref=unknown

Jumana Emil Abboud was born in Shefa-‘Amr, Galilee. Her artistic practice constellates personal stories and collective mythologies, weaving folklore and contemporary tales to navigate themes of memory and dispossession. Employing drawing, video, performance, objects, and text, she surveys place and resilience amidst the topography of Palestine., https://www.librarystack.org/songs-to-sound-worlds-feathers/?ref=unknown

Kara Springer is an artist of Jamaican and Bajan heritage, who was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, and raised in Southern Ontario, Canada. Her work is concerned with care and armature — the underlying structure that holds the flesh of a body in place. Working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific interventions, she surveys forms of structural support within urban infrastructure and systems of institutional and political power., https://www.librarystack.org/songs-to-sound-worlds-systems/?ref=unknown

Holding on to Writing is the fourth episode of the Feminisms in the Caribbean series, which emerges from a conversation with Haitian writer, poet and novelist Kettly Mars. Haiti is at the heart of her creation, being a pretext for her relationship with words, her fondness for storytelling and the exploration of the human soul. During her process of writing words often come before ideas. The writer’s body becomes a medium for the words, broadening a visceral relationship with language. One of the extraordinary qualities of words is that they cannot always explain themselves: they are content, but they are also form. They are result, but also process. Writing becomes something that happens and not just something writers do. It is a social, intimate, and responsive encounter with language that allows realities to appear within other realities. Writing can be an ethical tool and a compass in moments of disorientation. Moreover, “holding on to writing,” an expression of Kettly Mars during the conversation, can make it a way of life. It was not until her thirties that Kettly Mars was able to devote herself fully to writing. Her previous work in administration brought her into contact with another kind of language very different from that of literature: the language of bureaucracy, which is also the language of institutional power. However, she was not so much influenced by this kind of language as by the people she met at the time. Kettly Mars, who has written extensively in French, also writes in Creole. While the two languages are part of her identity, her emotional relationship is not the same with each of them. This relationship also includes the socio-political context of Haiti over the years, during and after the Duvalier dictatorship. Different from history books, which are a collection of historical facts, names and events, novels and fiction add new meanings, add multiples senses and add everyday lives to official history., https://www.librarystack.org/feminisms-in-the-caribbean-holding-on-to-writing/?ref=unknown

What would it mean to collectively image, and in doing so, reimagine the planet? To see its details and patterns from many situated positions? If we could each take a photo of our home from space, could we build a patchwork, an impossible view, another whole earth? On the first day of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, a network of people operating DIY satellite ground stations around the world captured a collective snapshot of the earth and its weather systems: a ‘nowcast’ for an undecided future. Tuning into transmissions from three National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites orbiting 800 km above Earth’s surface, members of the network collected imagery and submitted field notes from their different locations. Combined, these contributions create a fractal image of the earth: a record of weather at different scales in which alternative patterns and relations emerge. This book, created by open-weather (Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann) and Rectangle (Lizzie Malcolm and Daniel Powers) is an archive of the nowcast and a set of lenses on the materials that compose it., https://www.librarystack.org/when-i-image-the-earth-i-imagine-another/?ref=unknown