You are warmly invited to a guided tour of the exhibition Looking Away and sound performances on Friday, 20 November, at 6 pm at the Gallery of Contemporary Art.
Gallery of Contemporary Art and Regional Museum, 6 pm
Guided tour of the exhibition Looking Away with exhibition curator Maximilian Lehner.
Gallery of Contemporary Art, 7 pm
Sound performances.
Kinga Tóth
EDEN
In the performance EDEN, Kinga Tóth explores the invisible and visible protective skins we build in order to exist in a world perceived as threatening. Inspired by her eponymous poem, the work examines the tension between a sterile, highly socialized safe space and the existential fear of what lies beyond one’s own boundaries. Dressed in a white anorak, the performer acts within a laboratory of her own psyche. EDEN addresses the deep-seated ambivalence of surviving: What does it feel like to function in a sterile glass room while the outside world remains out of reach? Leaving this space promises liberation, yet carries the risk of metaphorical death, since the individual was “made” for isolation and socialized within it. In the end, a fundamental question remains: Is there any hope of creating a new, unfiltered reality outside the aquarium?
Antoni Rayzhekov
The Evasive Choir: Rhythms of Hesitation
The Evasive Choir: Rhythms of Hesitation is a new, fifteen-minute sound performance by Antoni Rayzhekov, composed from the sighs and hesitations left in interviews (1989–2021) with Bulgarian politicians once every word has been removed. The same archive was the source of the installation The Evasive Choir (2021) and of its vinyl edition and compact gramophone-suitcase version The Evasive Choir: REMIXED (2022). The installation stretches these sounds into long tones and REMIXED sets them on vinyl as rhythmic structures, whereas the performance plays them live. An instrument designed by the artist transforms everyday objects into musical scores, each object holding one voice, and as the objects are moved and turned on the table, their size, shape and place decide when each voice hesitates, and for how long.
