The Listening Academy: Performances


IKLECTIK presents,

The Listening Academy: Performances

Wednesday 31 August 2022 | Doors: 8pm | First Act: 8:30pm

FREE ENTRY – NO BOOKING REQUIRED

THE LISTENING ACADEMY is an independent research academy focusing on listening as a philosophical, artistic, social and somatic issue. This entails a relation to sonic, performative and ecological practices, sound studies research, and experimental pedagogy. The Academy offers a generative and nurturing framework for researchers and practitioners to engage in collaborative exchange and the sharing of knowledge, as well as workshopping new directions in sound studies and related practices.

THE LISTENING ACADEMY is part of THE LISTENING BIENNIAL, an international network and biennial exhibition
platform. 

THE LISTENING ACADEMY is currently running at IKLECTIK, through 4th September.
https://listeningbiennial.net/

Rajni Shah

Rajni Shah will share some of their thinking around (and experiences of) listening, racism, safety, and song. The performance will include a chance to engage with Rajni’s new book and accompanying zines, Experiments in Listening. It will be reflective, slow, and kind. If you often feel marginalised or silenced by more mainstream structures of dialogue and interaction, you are especially welcome.
Rajni Shah (they, them) is an artist whose practice is focused on listening and gathering as creative and political acts. Key projects—always created alongside and in collaboration with others—include hold each as we fall (1999), The Awkward Position (2003-2004), Mr Quiver (2005-2008), small gifts (2006-2008), Dinner with America (2007-2009), Glorious (2010-2012), Experiments in Listening (2014-2015), Lying Fallow (2014-2015), Song (2016), I don’t know how (to decolonize myself) (2018), Feminist Killjoys Reading Group (2016-2020) and Listening Tables (2019-2020). In 2021, Rajni published a monograph and series of print-at-home zines as part of the Performance Philosophy Series with Rowman & Littlefield, entitled Experiments in Listening. Rajni currently works as a tutor and resident researcher at DAS Graduate School (Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) and as a freelance artist, writer, and facilitator.
www.rajnishah.com
https://autumnbling.blogspot.com/

Esi Eshun

In Antinomia, multidisciplinary artist Esi Eshun presents a listening event combining live voice and sound works incorporating dramatised scenarios, poetic fragments, commentary and song, in an exploration of the recurring narratives Britain and its allies tell themselves about their past and present.
Esi Eshun is an artist and independent researcher using text, sound, performance and moving image to investigate some of the socio-economic, psychological and philosophical contradictions of colonialism and its continuing geopolitical and ecological consequences.
Her work draws on extensive research and employs poetic idioms, embodied performance styles and elements of improvisation to create narratives that, by directing attention to the nature of their own construction, play a part in interrogating the roles of myth and fabulation in establishing and maintaining multiple power relations. Much of the work “gives voice” to archival materials, putting them in dialogue with contemporary phenomena and ideas, while attempting to destabilise specific, inherited conceptions around time, space and identity. Her work continually returns to the ways in which limitations in Enlightenment thinking coincide with erasures of colonial histories and with more-than-human lives.
Esi’s solo and collaborative projects have been presented across the UK and internationally, including, at the Life Between Islands exhibition, Tate Britain (2022), at the 2021 Estuary Festival, the 2020 Berlin Berlinale, 2020 Dhakar Film Festival, and at Radio Space Borealis, Bergen, Norway (2018).