how-to-do-speech-with-taqsim
Interactive Performance, 60 min. by Alexander Tuchacek
GaleriBu, Istanbul – January 10, 8 pm
The current artist-in-residence in Istanbul from the City of Zurich – Alexander Tuchacek – works with sound, natural language, voices, computer codes and text. The Austrian born artist lives in Zurich and has a professorship at the University of the Arts Zurich.
Since the early nineties he has developed data spaces in which visitors can rearrange abstract visual and audio structures. For him promises of self-empowerment and participation are integral to his performances and installations.
For Istanbul he is preparing the interactive performance how-to-do-speech-with-taqsim based on the interdiction of speech and language which we are experiencing recently world wide in the polarization of communities, prejudices, origin, ideologies and ethics. The audience will be involved and becoming part into this performance by using their mobile phones by doing so they are becoming an active part of the networked presentation.
For how-to-do-speech-with-taqsim he uses “taqsim” as a form of musical improvisation, that usually precedes the performance of a traditional Arabic, Greek, Middle Eastern, or Turkish musical composition. He will therefore perform a software code, which consists of parts of a text concerning the topic of how to speek (in a political sense) in digital networked enviroments. During the performance, he will stretch, loop and distort text fragments based on activities of European right-wing populists, protests of activists and passages from a popular Turkish music. Within the performance the spectators are required to intervene into the given sound installation by using their mobile phones and become part of the mediated ephemeral space, a sort of becoming a collective voice but through their digital devices. This interactive performance requires a contemplative thinking space in which comfortable seating (e.g.on the floor) for the audience is required.
Since 2015 the City of Zurich awards an artist-in-residence grant for Istanbul in the frame of its cultural promotion program. The selected artists are working and living in Istanbul for 6 month.
The residency program is supported and supervised by the Istanbul based cultural initiative diyalog. The intention of the granted stay in Istanbul is to provide the artists with a stimulating, enriching experience. Alexander Tuchacek is the fifth artist-in-residence of this program and he will stay in Istanbul until the end of January 2018.
Serdar-ı Ekrem Sok. No:11
Galata / Beyoğlu / İstanbul
supported by
