IKLECTIK presents,
The Listening Academy: “Performing the Transvoice”
with Roshanak Kheshti & Salar Mameni + Ain Bailey + Anna Sherbany
Friday 2 September 2022 | Doors: 7:30pm with Live Installation by Anna Sherbany | First Act: 8pm
Our outdoor Kiosk is open from 11am.
FREE ENTRY – NO BOOKING REQUIRED
Programme
7:30pm Anna Sherbany
8pm Ain Bailey
9pm Roshanak Kheshti & Salar Mameni
anna sherbany – Still Voices
Many stories, customs and rituals are gradually disappearing as a consequence of forced mass movements of communities and their further dispersal. As with many of her photographic works and installations Still voices focuses on memory, dislocation and cultural identity. It captures the personal narratives of five migrants with an Arabic background through visual and audio portraits produced by the artist in London in the late 1990’s. The work was exhibited in her solo exhibition at the National Museum of San Salvador, El Salvador in 2005, Riverhouse Gallery, London 2006 and Kornhaus Museum, Algåu, Germany in 2021.
anna sherbany is a London based artist, cultural worker and lecturer. She has taught at Norwich School of Art, KIAD (Kent Institute of Art & Design), Kingston University, London, and the International Academy of Art, Palestine. Her artworks have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in the UK and internationally including EV+A International Biennale (Limerick, Ireland, 2006), International Biennale of Photography (Istanbul, 2006), Counterpoint Arts (London, 2006, 2011, 2015), BIOS (Athens, 2015), Mittelmeer Film Festival (Munich, 2018). Her new photo/sound installation “… and this is what I’ve seen my mother doing” is currently being exhibited at Documenta15, Kassel (Germany, 2022), where she is participating in the project of Palestinian artist Jumana Emil Abboud, The Unbearable
Halfness of Being and performing for the storytelling collective The Water Diviners.
Ain Bailey – a mash up/edits of recent works
Ain Bailey is an artist, composer and DJ. She facilitates workshops considering the role of sound in the formation of identity, and conducts sound workshops with LGBTI+ refugees/asylum seekers. Past exhibitions include ‘The Range’ at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; ‘RE: Respite’ at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, and a solo show at Cubitt Gallery, London And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love (2019). In 2020 Bailey and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski were commissioned by Studio Voltaire’s, Desperate Living programme, for which they created a composition and print entitled Remember To Exhale.
Last year, Bailey was commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, to create the exhibition Version, and composed Atlantic Railton which was part of the Listening To The City strand for the Serpentine Pavilion. 2022 sees Bailey’s inclusion in the group show Black Melancholia at CCS Bard, NY, and is the commissioned artist for Brückenmusik 27, Cologne, Germany.
Roshanak Kheshti & Salar Mameni – Performing the Transvoice
Vocal therapy is a mainstream component of transitioning for transgendered people. This is because, along with other modes of gender performativity, voice sonifies gender. This lecture performance theorizes the transvoice in transvocal training techniques with an emphasis on the intersection of the anatomy of vocalization and its gendered audition. We theorize the anatomy of voice–the diaphragm, the chest, the throat–as a resonant chamber and an instrument amenable to gendered tuning. The field of speech pathology has developed training protocols for therapists working on voice with transgender clients. These techniques take seriously the body’s sonicity in everyday life. Much like voice training for singers, the training of the transvoice creates a space to rehearse standards of pitch, timber and resonance. Because transvocal training rehearses for vocal, and thus gender performativity, in our lecture performance we create a performance of this rehearsal with video, text and sound.
Salar Mameni is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Trained as an Art Historian specializing in transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world, Mameni’s first book titled Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (forthcoming with Duke University Press in ANIMA series) is an transdisciplinary study that considers the scientific designation of the Anthropocene in relation to the declaration of the War on Terror. The book takes the non-secular perspective of artists working in Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Kuwait (among others) to tackle the question of climate change in relation to ongoing war and militarism in the region. Mameni’s second book project continues the cross disciplinary feminist STS framework of the first book to examine Trans* Medicinal practices in the Muslim world. Tentatively titled: “Transgender Ecologies within Islamic Medicine,” Mameni’s second book traces histories of transgender medicine within Islamic medical traditions in the so-called “Golden Age” of Islamic medicine from 11th-14th centuries, a period that produced medical treatises by physician philosophers that continue to serve as reference for contemporary understandings of transgender embodiment. Mameni has published articles in Signs, Women & Performance, Resilience, Visual Sociology and Al-Raida among others. In collaboration with Roshanak Kheshti, Mameni has developed the lecture performances Veil Manifesto, (performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Mexico City and London) and Performing the Transvoice.
Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. She is an anthropologist, feminist, queer and critical race theorist, born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee working at the intersection of sound, the senses, film and performance studies with an emphasis on diaspora and race. She is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015) and Switched-on Bach (Bloomsbury Academic, 33 1/3, 2019) and is currently completing her third book, tentatively titled “We See with the Skin: Zora Neale Hurston’s Synesthetic Theory”. Her articles and essays have appear in the Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Current Musicology, Feminist Media Histories, Hypatia, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theater Survey, Social Text, and Sounding Out!. In collaboration with Salar Mameni, Kheshti has developed the lecture performances Veil Manifesto, (performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Mexico City and London) and Performing the Transvoice.
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/
