Fari Bradley

STOP PRESS! THIS WEBSITE IS OUT OF USE...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 11:03:00 +0000

Au Revoir Works!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 10:59:00 +0000

Three of my works, two electric light works and a textile piece, have gone into private and public collections recently, and I found myself wondering if I'd ever see them again.

Certainly I can hope to see the Joni Mitchell piece On a Rock Floating Through Space, 2017 in my lifetime, as the not-for-profit Maraya Arts Centre in Sharjah has a great record of displaying its collection and finding new ways for the public and artists to engage with it.

I'll never forget that it was on the first floor of Maraya, which was a drop-in study centre, I first met encountered youngsters from all the Emirates gathering in one place. That seems important when you know the country at a certain proximity.

Mitchell's song lyrics which I heard and then read as a teen, have remained with me since surfacing from time to time when the moment is apt. I regard Joni Mitchell as one of three of the greatest song lyricists of my time. The title of the song Hejira, and title of the album, is taken from the Arabic word for journey. Although the word hijra usually referring to the migration of the Islamic prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622, the song describes a long car journey Mitchell made and the realisations that came to her while in that limbo:

We all come and go unknown

Each so deep and superficial between the forceps and the stone

Well I looked at the granite markers,

Those tributes to finality, eternity

And then I looked at myself here

Chicken scratching for a piece of immortality

[...]

We're only particles of change I know, I know

We're just orbiting around the sun

But how can I have that point of view
When I'm bound and tight to someone.

When we opened Stitches to Save 9 With, the exhibition in which these works featured, arts writer and curator Mahnaz Fancy held a really insightful Q&A with me on the works and we listened to extracts of the music that had inspired the pieces. After which the amazing cellist Clara Asuaje performed an improv piece with me in reference to the film Electric Dreams.

Frieze Week Specials - Resonance104.4FM

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 15:30:00 +0000

Tonight and for the next four days, Resonance104.4Fm
broadcast a series of programmes I've produced discussing
Frieze London, and the many satellite events taking place as
the international art world make a yearly visit to London.

Episodes 1-4 touch on: 'What has been the changing face of
the fair, how does it impact not only the art market but the
art scene in London and what other events have grown up,
not only to benefit from the international footfall and
attention, but to supplement some of the shortcomings of the
art market in general?'

With live performances, cut ups from my own Frieze and
Zoo Art Fair audio 2007-present, interviews and debate, the
shows were broadcast on air, on digital radio signal and
streamed online. Podcasts are below.

Ep. 1 - Mon 2nd October 8-9pm

Frieze Week Overview

• Sumi Ghose - arts writer and ex-Asia House director, previously Exhibitions Director at the Union Museum Dubai, now Japan House, London

• The Legendary Bob Parks - Gallery of Everything

• Cody Ledvina - Gallery of Everything

• Gordon Cheung, London born artist of Hong Kong heritage, with Alan Cristea Gallery and Edel Assanti, London

Ep. 2 - Tues 3rd Oct 8-9pm

What’s on and what’s been discontinued, inside Frieze and in the wider London Frieze Week 2017 programme

• Silvana Lagos - Cultural Programming at Approved by Pablo, Studio Carsten Höller & Loop Magazine

• Maria Stefanos who ran a independent gallery that is now closed, on the changing faces of the London gallery scene

• Bernadine Brocker Weider, director of Vastari, a database of private collections, a place for curators to go look up works before they put together a show, and working with Cromwell Place to run a series of high profile talks all through Frieze Week in Kensington.

Ep. 3 - Wed 4th October 4-5pm
Shooting Arrows at monoliths within the arts
Issues of unequal opportunities, mis- and non-representation in the arts

Touria El Glaoui

Founding Director of the leading international art fair dedicated to Africa, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Somerset House London, New York and now Morocco.

Niamh Coghlan

Associate Director - Richard Saltoun Gallery presenting two solo booths across the fairs. At Frieze’s new ‘Sex Works’ section they’ll exhibit new and historical works by the radical feminist artist Renate Bertlmann, whereas at Frieze Masters’ ‘Spotlight’ section they’ll present 100 Boots (1972), the seminal conceptual work of the American artist Eleanor Antin, whose recent photographic series are on show - and still will be during Frieze week - at their gallery space in Fitzrovia. As female artists who began working in the 60s, one in Austria and one in America, they have both faced an uphill battle to have their work exhibited, collected, and included in mainstream discussions and critical analysis at the time.

Sophie Hall

Co-Director at Flowers Gallery, currently showing at their two London gallery space Aleah Chapin's monumental nudes of older women and Wabbling Back to the Fire an exhibition by Nicola Hicks MBE, brings together sculptures from 1999 to the present day, drawing on themes that express the universal, and often darker aspects of humanity, encompassing grief, love, understanding, war and money.

Ep. 4 - Thurs 5th October 8-9pm

Frieze’s impact on London and UK

James Brett, John Martin, Nayrouz Tatanaki and Tina Zeigler

A broad perspective of the art market’s influence on metrics of success and London's response to the direction of Frieze Fairs.

How do large organisations stay in touch with the world around them outside of the art market, some personal reflections on the art market’s influence on metrics of success, as well as a discussion of things we've seen popping up and disappearing over the years during Frieze week, and how Frieze is perceived by the rest of the country/world versus, say, the Biennial.

• Nayrouz Tatanaki
Director at Lisson Gallery

• James Brett
Founder founder of The Museum + Gallery of Everything

• Sumi Ghose
Arts writer and ex-Asia House director, previously exhibitions director at the Union Museum Dubai, now Japan House

• John Martin
A founder of Art Dubai, now launching Cromwell Place, who this year are programing a wide series of talks and open days for their new working model space in Kensington

• Tina Ziegler
Fair Director of Moniker Art Fair, London's foremost street art and urban art fair, The Old Truman Brewery, London

LISTEN

Live on air on 104.4FM, on your radio dial in London
On digital radio in London
Stream online globally, for which there's also a handy app:

In the Dead of Night, The Reeds Speak of Separation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 09:02:00 +0000

An extract from my talk at English Literature Department at University of Bristol, 2017, Animal Utterances conference. Discussing a summer spent recording at all times of day in the Sharjah desert and mountains, I play out the sounds of night-caterwauling made by animals both caged in the outdoor wildlife centre, and free in the wilderness around it. After listening I show the graphic shape made by that collective sound, comparing the longing in the night-chorus to that longing described by Persian poet Rumi as the bird longing for unity. The images below, of the animals' collective sound intertwined with the physical space taken up by the mosque, one a ghost of another, are a miraculous find made by chance in my late night recordings. The pre-dawn azan had triggered amongst animals of every species, a huge collective cry, that mimicked the shape of the mosque nearby.

In the Dead of Night, The Reeds Speak of Separation, Bradley, 2017. Digital print on silk coated digital paper. 100x300cm

"Further away from the wolf pen, we made a more balanced recording of all the morning's singers with whom the wolves had been calling. By making the same recording overnight from the leopard enclosure, we were able to hear more of the finer animal calls in the mix. Expanding the sound, I discovered a blip in the timeline, a rising and falling, a cacophony of creatures, calling up to the sky. I then had to work out whether whether it was the airplanes that had set off this morning cacophony or something else. It was in fact, the first azaan, before the call to prayer, in the distance which can be heard faintly at the start and end of the collective racket made by the animals.

One can see the shape of the sound, rising up out of the darkness, is much fuller for the chorus and resembles to my mind the very mosque it is singing along with, or perhaps masking. Have the animals become the sketchers of the acoustic footprint of the mosque itself, creating their own architecture in space but with sound?

In the Dead of Night, The Reeds Speak of Separation 2, Bradley, 2017. Digital print on silk coated digital paper. 100x100cm

The azaan is a sound one hears everywhere, even in desert outposts makeshift and resplendent mosques alike pepper the landscape. I was born in Iran and for me the azaan played out 5 times a day for the first formative years of my life, it somehow gets under the skin. The praying face East from wherever they are, like migratory birds who know the direction of north, south, east, west, wherever you place them, the one who prays must orientate themselves. The prayer, conducted at the same time each day brings people together, it is said 'to remember their purpose in life', a reminder of their collective humanity, of their oneness. So how do the animals react to this circadian ritual of acousmatic sound? In a situation in which they cannot walk away, the azaan becomes part of their own daily ritual. Here is evidence that the animals join in, and enunciate in unaccompanied crescendo. Needing no amplification, they do not sing, but rather call out in complete darkness, a time when sound carries further than any other during the day and has more agency. The different species call as one, to whom we do not know, call to all free animals, who too join in. We often discuss the voices of animals but less what they hear, yet certainly they are hearing, first the azaan, then themselves, then their cacophonous unity, and with that collective sound they supersede the boundaries of their cages. The inhabitants of the wildlife centre making their acoustic footprint larger than the limits of the ones they are able to make in the desert sand, sending their sound up like a free bird, or the souls that Persian Sufi poet Jalal aldin Rumi compares often to a bird.

“The soul is like a falcon and the body chains,
a slave that's bound of foot and broken winged.”
Mathnawee

Rumi's spiritual ornithology compares mankind unfavourably to the spirit, which is a falcon, who would return to the arm of the king, i.e. the divine. Yet to Rumi humans are only owls (fowls), they are not falcons. Here in The Capturing of the Falcon Among the Owls in the Wilderness
(Mathnawi, book II):

O all you disputatious fowls, be falcons
and listen to your royal falcon-drum
From your diversity to unity
set out from all directions joyfully!

In the Dead of Night, The Reeds Speak of Separation 3, Bradley, 2017. Digital print on silk coated digital paper. 100x100cm

But most of all it is Rumi’s flute, which resembles the expression of the soul yearning to return to its state of oneness, which I hear amongst the animals before dawn. I returned to this poem as I know it very well, having performed it several times including at Cafe Oto and the Delfina Foundation London. Here in his poem, Rumi describes the throat as the flute, the utterance that links us, that calls to return to the divine, while the voiceless fish (the spiritually dead mystics - religious authorities -, who cannot fly, nor use the air to carry up their call) being blind to what is all around them, are unable to satisfy this longing:

Listen to the story told by the reed,  of being separated:

"Since I was cut from the reedbed,  I have made this crying sound.
Anyone apart from someone he loves  understands what I say.
Anyone pulled from a source  longs to go back.
At any gathering I am there,  mingling in the laughing and grieving,
a friend to each, but few  will hear the secrets hidden / within the notes.
No ears for that.
Body flowing out of spirit,  spirit up from body: no concealing / that mixing.
But it's not given us  to see the soul.
The reed flute  is fire, not wind. Be that empty."

Hear the love-fire tangled  in the reed notes, as bewilderment  melts into wine.
The reed is a friend  to all who want the fabric torn  and drawn away.
The reed is hurt and salve combining.  Intimacy and longing for intimacy, one song
A disastrous surrender,  and a fine love, together.
The one who secretly hears this  is senseless. A tongue has  one customer, the ear.
If a sugarcane flute had no effect,  it would not have been able to make sugar in the reedbed. Whatever sound  it makes is for everyone.
Days full of wanting, let them go by  without worrying that they do.
Stay where you are, inside  such a pure, hollow note.
Every thirst gets satisfied except  that of these fish, the mystics,  who swim an ocean of grace  still somehow longing for it!
No one lives in that without  being nourished every day.
But if someone doesn't want  to hear the song of the reed flute,  it's best to cut conversation  short, say goodbye, and leave.

Venice Pavilion That Contains Neither Artists, Nor Art?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 10:05:00 +0000

2017 Tunisian pavilion curator at Venice, Lina Lazaar explains her thinking behind a phantom art show, in which would-be Tunisian migrants, who were previously refused entry into Europe, become performers in a public display of contempt for the confines of nationality imposed on us by government documents such as visas. This hour long interview also became a print article in Canvas magazine, Middle East.

Oxford Handbooks

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 15 May 2017 16:06:00 +0000

Harper's Bazaar Arabia Commission, 2014.

A chapter is coming out on sound in the new Oxford Handbook on Sound Art.

Aside from that there are several biennial review articles soon to be published in print, plus a paper for Bristol University's Animal Utterance conference with Bristol Museum and Art Gallery 24th and 24th May. I'm presenting on findings made when recording endangered Arabian wildlife in the desert and mountains the summer heat for a series of permanent sound installations at a wildlife centre in Sharjah.

A few of my sounds from Documenta14, in Athens are due as a mix for several online stations (in Italy and Greece) but here below's what they sounded like, on one of the UK Resonance104.4FM on air broadcasts.

Stitches to Save 9 With - Solo Show March 9- April 24th, 2017, The Mine

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 10:29:00 +0000

No (Wo)man's an Island, 2017. PVC leather, embroidery. Dimensions variable

After several years in my practice of experimenting with sculptural forms inside the gallery context, and outside as sculpture or performative gesture in areas of designated 'public space', Stitches to Save 9 With at The Mine; a mainly textile series that explores language, meaning and memory. The works in this series evoke the sound of spoken or chanted lines in the mind of the onlooker. The sing-song delivery of many of these sayings, learned along with the lines, are meant to make these phrases indelible in the mind. Ironically however these maxims, truisms and dictums, although often useful, are largely forgotten or half remembered and are falling out of use.

Parts of longer speeches or poems, for example by John Dunne (1572-1631) or Seneca (4 BC–AD 65), these were once common 'verbal tools' yet now like hand stitching itself, is falling out of use. Yet writers such as Dunne, wrote about such lasting and recurring dangers as the dangers of isolationism, which could not be more relevant to the politics of today as questions of citizenship, 'race', and movement arise. On a Ukrainian flag are stitched a new proverb for today in red, white and blue: You can't stop the wind from carrying a seed.

Many of the phrases we know and remember are described are imagined differently in other languages, for example 'Break a leg' translates as 'Into the wolf's the mouth' in Italian. As these translated sayings impart the same message, they are at once cultural markers of both our overall oneness as a species, as well as our localised differences as citizens, class members, even gendered groups.

On another level, a reading of these words of wisdom brings into focus aspects of a distinctly male view of the world, revealing archaic, even damaging perspectives in their exclusion and exceptionalism, that we have unwittingly perpetuated. There is therefore a tension between what is needed in language, what we recall and what we use ourselves in contemporary sourced echo this tension, I feel, about memory and inheritance, our fast culture, the disposable production-ethic of cheap items today and also the way we make quickly surmised readings and how that is related to the way we view 'art'.

I began to consider what could the truisms for today be, and what would our inherited phrases have been if women had written history instead of men?

With Stitches to Save 9 With art's ability to draw attention to aspects of our ethics, is drawn in close parallel with the poetry's (or song lyrics') ability to do the same, as is the highly elucidating power poetry commands to suggests nuanced layers of meaning while also speaking on a very direct level to the listener. The press release below, part-edited by Dr. Ali MacGilp, discusses the concept and its relation to the overall material concerns of the show.

Electric Dreams Can't Last, 2017. Acrylic lightbox, vinyl image, electric cabling. (60 x 90cm)

No Shadows in Paradise, 2017. Neon tubing, perspex backing, electronic and cabling. (70 x 120 cm)

For the women's work aprons "No Woman is an Island", I took from English poet John Donne, in what is an extremely topical poem even today.

MEDITATION XVII
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions by John Donne
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod(1) be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory(2) were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

1 Piece of earth

2 A high point of land or rock projecting into a body of water

On a Rock Floating Through Space, 2017. Cotton, embroidery thread, found frame, aerosol, coloured sand. 90 x 90cm

The True Veil, 2017. Embroidery thread, cotton, found wooden frame. (90 x 70cm)

PRESS RELEASE

In this exhibition, Fari Bradley explores the nuances of language, history and memory. Contemplating either the usefulness or destructive nature of traditionally recited proverbs, truisms, and dictums alongside several new ones for today, Bradley renders them as signifiers, using textile and mixed media.

Stitches to Save 9 With pits the deliberate form of stitching against quickly spoken lines, fleeting inspirations and ‘quippage’. A proverbial expression, 'a stitch in time saves nine' is an incentive: to stitch a tear in a cloth, now, before the tear becomes larger and harder to mend. The ‘nine’ refers to the greater number of stitches that will be needed later, if one quick stitch isn't performed ‘in time’. This and other wise homilies in this body of work are falling out of use - just as hand stitching itself is disappearing.

Using a range of materials, Bradley employs methods and tools that formed part of her upbringing. With a parent who studied and practiced professional dress-making, offcuts had been Bradley's childhood playthings. Here, alien found objects, chanced upon threads and remnants serve as inspiration for her work, chiming with the popular reaction for a DIY aesthetic, against today's overwhelmingly disposable culture of low cost production. Such stitched works, while historically a hobby for the upper classes, also reference a certain Anglo-Saxon work ethic preached at the poor. Referencing this WWII 'make do and mend' work ethic, spoken, chanted lessons for life are rendered in traditionally feminine techniques, employing domestic skills that young girls once had to demonstrate in order to become 'marriage material'.

Decoratively Bradley's pieces resist a perspective framed in language, that often posits the idea that human experience is 'male experience'; No man is an island, for example. Yet while Stitches to Save 9 With is founded on the often sombre messages behind these mechanically memorised sayings, Bradley's techniques employ layers of satirical significance and testingly playful semantics.

Working mainly as a sound and radio artist, Bradley's previous works include musical scores rendered in weave, or sculptures combining textiles and electronics. Knitting patterns were a doorway into the algorithmic processes of electronic music, while sewing patterns were parallels to the diagrams used in building electronic circuits, and are a visual language Bradley has explored in her arts practice since 2006

Marcel Proust’s observation“The remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were” inspired Bradley to visualise memory expressed as an imperfect picture, on which we have all embroidered our own threads, colouring experience as we saw them. Here the emotion involved in remembering contrasts with the automated way in which, for centuries, past generations have handed down these immutable wisdoms. Such spoken adages were modified to make them easy to remember and repeat, yet lack the vital quality of adaptation for the future, by which all things must survive.

My past work with The Mine includes a performance with Chris Weaver, for which we invited artists Jumairy and Sofia Chatsisaranti to collaborate:

Threads of Form and Abstraction

How do You Fealh? Lying Fallow for a Season.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 08:15:00 +0000

Question: Is an artist a machine?

fal·low

(făl′ō) adj.

fal′low·ness n.

To rest is to gather energy and ideas, does this make you a better human, a better artist? If output is continuous, are you an unthinking machine. It's a bit of a leap, to let go of continuous action, to pause creative output. Like a library taking time to restock itself.
The age old wisdom of 'lying fallow' for a season, which was 4 months in London, has been most instructive.
A period of gathering. It has been both wonderful and a chore.
As a result I'm able to say, one does not waste talent lying fallow, but instead, one allows it to deepen.

A fallow field is:
1. Plowed and left unseeded during one growing season.

2. Characterized by apparent inactivity: a fallow gold market.

3. Plowed and tilled (land), time taken to eradicate or reduce weeds.

[Middle English falow, from Old English fealh, fallow land.]

How do you fealh?
Harvest will be around March, with a series of surround sound performances in Sharjah in the UAE for Maraya Art Centre, a solo showing of my work in Dubai at The Mine and a short music residency at New York University in Abu Dhabi in February.

February also sees the launch of our radio works for Sharjah Art Foundation, When the Near Becomes Far.

Meanwhile my two weekly radio shows on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra have continued, so perhaps it wasn't a completely fallow period: Six Pillars and Free Lab Radio.

So How'd the Year of the Monkey Turn Out for You?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 12:28:00 +0000

These waves,
Emitted not by rhythms,
Waves that are if unheeded, utterly silent.
A data ocean, in which
You buoy yourself,
You embroil yourself,
To which you give up Life's greatest credit,
You give time,
These waves in which
You swim, only to sink in at the first real news;
Speculation, gambling, affectation,
The binary coded sounds of a species confused.

2016 was the year of the Monkey. How did it turn out for you?

Monkey: "I am the seasoned traveler
Of the Labyrinth.
The genius of alacrity,
Wizard of the impossible.
My brilliance is yet
unmatched
In its originality.
My heart’s filled with potent magic
That could cast a hundred spells.
I am put together
For mine own pleasure
I AM THE MONKEY."

2016, The Year of the Monkey, in January this year, was discussed with some trepidation by observers of Chinese calendar tradition.

Now at the year's close, bookshops in London stock the pictured publication.

Keep Woke

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 18:33:00 +0000

To 'Keep Calm' is one thing, to cocoon your mind in self-centred obsession another;
your projects your friends your events your circle...your output your income your appearance.

This inward turning, a narcissistic echo and webbed mirror we have been sold
gives common ground over to those who damage;
extremists and mortally dangerous businesses pursuing profit and power,
in every sphere, at every level
while we look the other way.

Sanity would demand it.

Waking up is talking to a stranger,
doing something you'll receive nothing, apparently, back for.

Take up the mantle. A steward of all that common good.

#woke blitz spirit

"A flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."

Standard Oil Company and Petro-Subjectivity, Performance - Radio Revolten

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 14:33:00 +0000

"Just a note to say I had a listen to 'Petro-Subjectivity, attracted by the title, and love it -- you really get to the heart of the toxic mess....

and the Neruda poem, oh yes.... in every dimension, really beautiful work....."

Gregory Whitehead, radio artist.

Making notes is the key to being a good poet, we were told, as we sat cross legged on the lawn of an Indian music academy in Maharastra, India in 1999. The speaker was a retired accountant, now renowned not only for the music academy he founded, but the many Qawaalis and poems he had penned since. He went on Write down anything that springs to mind; a line, a phrase, you never know what it may blossom into.

Now, years later, in a new century, in which the fall out from past actions by BP in Iran are still surfacing, old lines come to mind. On this reflection, we performed an hour's live piece for Radio Revolten, composed of my recordings of the sounds of my surroundings in Halle, a town full of astoundingly detailed architecture. I also pulled in a thread begun in my last post, the poem by Neruda, and a book on my shelf, Petrosubjectivity by Brett Bloom, who I'd interviewed many years ago for Resonance104.4FM. The sounds of Halle were: football hooligans (one wearing an electronic tag on his ankle), the train from Leipzig to Halle, an impressive array of musical instruments decorating our Airbnb: Persian tar, a guitar I prepared, electronic keyboards, an accordion, a ukelele, a berimbau...and voices at Radio Revolten. Here Georg Nicholl translates my Neruda reading spontaneously into German, in an improvised ping pong of thought and suggested images. The sounds of being in Germany then, with thoughts of a reoccurring greed for profit.
What has Neruda's pen done to stem the growth of hatred, except to identify more clearly the uninhabited gestures of a common enemy.

All Hallows' Eve

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 12:26:00 +0000

I made these videos on my phone, both are with the original ambient sound, one made in a shopping Mall in the UAE, the other in a homestead in UK. I post them here as a note, because it struck me, again, this Halloween that no fiction is scarier than the reality of what, in fact, men to do one another, and to themselves; from the swift impact of war, to the slower seeping poisons of capitalism.
Neruda says it most clearly, below, an extract from his early poem Standard Oil Company:

Standard Oil Company

Their obese emperors from New York
are suave smiling assassins
who buy silk, nylon, cigars
petty tyrants and dictators.
They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils,
distant regions where the poor hoard their corn
like misers their gold:
Standard Oil awakens them,
clothes them in uniforms, designates
which brother is the enemy.
the Paraguayan fights its war,
and the Bolivian wastes away
in the jungle with its machine gun.

A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum,
a million-acre mortgage,
a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified,
a new prison camp for subversives,
in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots
beneath a petroliferous moon,
a subtle change of ministers
in the capital, a whisper
like an oil tide,
and zap, you’ll see
how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds,
above the seas, in your home,
illuminating their dominions.

Extract, Pablo Neruda

Jebel Hafeet Mountain - جبل حفيت‎

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 17 Sep 2016 12:32:00 +0000

Driving to Al Ain, towards Oman, at Jebel Hafeet the coral has formed an immense natural totem.

The pink of the rock body, reaching up to the uninterrupted sky, meets its hue in the glowing tail of the receding sun.

Hundreds of creatures, a mass of butterflies, thrive around caves at the base, where a hot water spring pools out in the horizon.

Graffiti behind iron railings, speaks of a millennia old human gesture; to daub on naturally occurring walls. Mountain felines convene around commercial food sources.

As day pulls away, electricity announces its dominion in the void of the night, and the landscape, the distance, becomes a transitory circuit board.

Noise of the Middle East - Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Jun 2016 11:51:00 +0000

Your drafts folder is a notepad. One I found was this clip taken from the crowd when I performed on stage during a short residency at New York University, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi.

#np on the plaza in front of @NYUADArtsCenter: Noise from the Middle East 2. #nyuad pic.twitter.com/NnO6ZZE1H2
— NYUAD Arts and Hum (@NYUAD_AH) November 4, 2015

Here's an interview with Time Out I gave about the festival.

The Wedding Project - Art Dubai

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 12 Mar 2016 19:09:00 +0000

The Wedding Project forms part of the politics of food programme that has been running at Delfina Foundation for some years now. The theme expands as a wedding project at Art Dubai 2016 where nightly eating and cooking as a performative act are explored.

The Mina a’Salam Hotel that are typically used as venues for executive meals, business conferences and weddings. Taking these formats as a starting point, Delfina Foundation has curated a pop-up bar and banquet hall under the theme os a wedding banquet and mixes continuous offerings of food and drink with seated, time-based performative meals. What would a wedding be without music?

Performance - An UnMuted Serving, Art Week Dubai

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 09:10:00 +0000

Recently my work has been in collaboration with Christopher Weaver, detailed on our website.

Our latest piece is a new performative, electro-acoustic piece titled An UnMuted Serving.

After exploring the tonalities and resonances of domestic objects for many years in the UK, we moved to the UAE and recently took part in a residency in Pakistan.
One way this move influenced our practice was that we incorporated the steel dining plates and cups, thali, common nearly exclusively to Indian and Pakistani homes both in the UAE. The thali is prevalent here in the UAE, on sale or in use in restaurants in every residential area where people of Indian and Pakistani origin reside.

For An UnMuted Serving we interact with these everyday domestic materials in a gestural performance, while digital sounds tease, obscure and mimic the sounds of these steel cups and plates, used daily in family dinners. Recontextualised, lit up on a stage or at a private gallery dinner, they take on a particular significance of both context and location. The piece explores a realm of both familiar and uncovered sounds, working in synchronicity and juxtaposition with electronically manipulated ones.

Our performance will mark the opening of the Art Week Dubai show at The Mine arts space of Japanese installation artist Yasuaki Onishi, in a private performance. Onishi's works, which we will be surrounded by, are ephemeral, translucent forms that collapse when touched. The installation is lit with a diffused glow that speaks of a warmth or a presence just out of view, rendering them a quality in their materiality that is reminiscent of the lightness of Japanese shoji room dividers, translucent papers over frames and lattices of wood or bamboo.

These glowing, forms are suspended with the most fragile filaments of black, that are traces of the artist's own gestures as he commitedly installs his own works. They are placed in order to point to an organic verticality, which takes on a pointed meaning in a city of skyscrapers and we intend our performance to add to their presence, while they give an unforgettable ambience to our work, symbiotically. In An UnMuted Serving, the thali bowls and dishes sing from a waist high table, to a room of people who are standing or seated. Traditionally in Indian, Pakistani Japanese homes all over the world, the thali are eaten from while seated on the floor, in some places with the hand.

There was a time, not long ago, when people of the Gulf too would dine seated on the floor, yet now very few homes keep up this practice or do so only on certain occasions.

On Wednesday March 16th, 5:45-6.30pm we perform the same, below the stage in the Al Fahidi (Al Bastakiya) heritage neighbourhood in Dubai. We decided the performance of An UnMuted Serving, rather than be performed on stage, should be at an accessible level on the ground, making the stage a prop in our participation with the space. The two storey buildings of Al Fahidi, made with local coral-cement and replete with wind towers, hark back to a time when people of the Gulf too would dine seated on the floor; only some homes now do or on certain occasions.

Sikka16 is in Al Fahidi is on the creek, in the old part of Dubai

In this way, the public squares within the Al Fahidi neighbourhood serve as performance spaces for different acts that bring part and present together, architecture and spoken word into a common realm, free for the public to view.

Christopher Weaver and I play the steel dinnerware alongside a video that we created to reflect the above points of interest.

An Alternative Geneology of Musique Concrete in Cairo - Ibraaz

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 09:10:00 +0000

El Dabh using tape in 1940s Cairo

A series of interviews by myself and Chris Weaver with Halim El Dabh (b.1921), who began using both musique concrete and reel to reel tape for his compositions in Egypt, years before Pierre Schaeffer, the composer that is ordinarily credited to have been the first.

This approx 5,000 word essay is the result of extensive research into El Dabh's background and the atmosphere in Cairo at the time which had allowed him to undertake these significant experiments. The article includes audio samples of his voice and early compositions, and quotes from interviews today while examining the place of El Dabh's composition and its significance within the wider history of creativity in his era.

El Dabh created a piece of music intended to be played back on a reel to reel tape recorder, rather than performed live, which no one had done before him. He also took sounds of the streets and manipulated them electronically, as components for his specifically musique concrete composition, in 1944.


Professor Halim El Dabh is 94 years old

This Week's Free Lab Radio - Mix by Fari B

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 12 Dec 2015 10:25:00 +0000

Complex movement. Sound generation. Kinesiology. Meaningful gesturing. Rhythmic synchronisation. Wordlessly communication. Brain synchrony. Rehabilitation and therapy. the magic of mutual gaze.

Dance is a Neuroscience

A mix by Fari B of the most sonically intriguing dance tunes in this year's playlist, plus new Nov-Dec releases. Moving through genres and sub-genres from 8-bit to Neurostep, it's a selection to end 2015 with.

Dance is a marriage of the representational capacity of language and the rhythmicity of music. Even though dance is a fundamental form of human expression, neuroscientists have given it relatively little consideration. The past decade, however, researchers have conducted the first brain-imaging studies of both amateur and professional dancers. These investigations address such questions as, How do dancers navigate though space? How do they pace their steps? How do people learn complex series of patterned movements? 1)

Streaming online and broadcasting on air on 104.4FM, at 11-midnight GMT (3-4am GST).
Repeat: Tuesday 4-5am GMT (7-8am GST)

Podcasts here.
Check out Fari's last mix below.

Free Lab Radio - Mmmix by Fari B on ResonanceFM by Fari B

1) http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v299/n1/full/scientificamerican0708-78.html

New Podcast - Betweenwhere, Clocktower Radio, NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Nov 2015 12:55:00 +0000

This Week's Free Lab Radio - Mix by Fari B on ResonanceFM

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 14 Nov 2015 12:09:00 +0000

This week's Free Lab Radio features Nomine, Om Unit, Robbie Hardkiss Aksak Maboul (Belgian avant-rock band founded in 1977), De Fantastiske To with their new release Pust, Nasty Ways, Jengi Beats, Jon Kennedy and more.

Mix live by Fari B.

Broadcasts 11-midnight on 104.4FM across London, online elsewhere.
http://radioplayer.resonancefm.com/console/

For more on Free Lab Radio find us one Facebook and via our website.

For repeat see schedule.

Free Lab Podcast - The Fantastic Machine, Mix by Fari B on Resonance104.4FM by Fari B

Noise of the Middle East Residency - Abu Dhabi

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 11:01:00 +0000

With a live performance tomorrow: Boikutt from Palestine, Yara Mekawei from Egypt and Mutamassik from Italy/Egypt on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, capital emirate of the United Arab Emirates. Here's a preview interview I did with Time Out Abu Dhabi for the festival which includes a residency of exchange with the other performers and students. Wed 4th 7pm we begin with a Q&A on stage hosted by Neil Van Der Linden.

Solo Exhibition Opens Tomorrow, London

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 07:54:00 +0000

Close to Karachi - an exhibition of new work by Fari Bradley and Chris Weaver, featuring sound, sculpture, print and found objects. The works are responses by the artists to a month's residency in Pakistan’s only port, the world’s second most populous city.

For their research the artists visited workshops making Pakistan’s distinctive truck art, and recorded the people and thoroughfares of the city. Touring lectures about their practice at three major universities, the conversation became a two-way research project - the dialogue orbiting around issues of social class (illustrated through the travel systems), the streets as locii of everyday life, and the politics of sound and silence. The works featured in this show range from photography (as a practice of creating "totems"), a sound installation responding to the materiality of the pieces and found objects that provide a dissonant postscript to Pakistan's history of self-determination.

Exhibition text extract by Natasha Morris Courtauld Institute of Art:
__________________________________
‘Close to Karachi’ presents the city’s social spaces as a fragmentary look into a place so dense and multifaceted that it is impossible to come to know as a whole.

Once called the ‘Gateway to Pakistan’, Karachi is home to 20 million living in a tightly constricted space. Once a thriving commercial centre, the country’s only port-city now sprawls into beaches and bazaars against the backdrop of structural socio-economic chaos and architectural decay and abeyance. What would the soundtrack to such a metropolis be? With its pronounced class divisions and manifold geographical boundaries, Karachi is a patchwork and a territory ripe for anthrophonic investigation. Atmospheric moments of multi-layered sonic bustle are punctuated often by insulated, resonant single notes. In most areas, the public domain of the street is frequented only by the underprivileged; the working class and the poor, while the rest are sheltered from this sonic ensemble inside their vehicles, engaging with the world around them almost accidentally, at a traffic light or on a jam, where the world literally comes knocking on their windows, asking for help. Amongst derelict structures in Art Nouveau and Venetian Gothic style, between the mass of rubbish that threatens to engulf everything around it, who are the ones to survive these harsh conditions and how can we create a visual language to convey the full range of the city’s complexities?

This exhibition seeks to examine different converging streams in the rich tapestry of Karachi’s society. At first, there is the street-level where on the edges of thriving informal economies, the dense soundscapes tell 100s of stories at once; in order to survive the city how do inhabitants manage escape this dense background noise? The second is the tale of modernity, a mysticism embodied by the ornate trucks and buses, the very same motor vehicles that drown out the sounds of the everyday life they pass, and where children are enlisted to work and endangered. And last, there is a new invasion of artefacts, charity donations from Britain, unwanted and unsold, filling the markets of Karachi with very personal, but now broadly anonymous histories from the very country from which Pakistan claimed its independence.
__________________________________
Preview 6-9pm October 15th 2015

Close to Karachi | Bradley-Weaver
16 October – 26 October 2015
Preview: Thursday 15 October 6-9pm

Edge of Arabia Gallery, London SW11 4AU (Map)

Opening times: Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm
Facebook Event Page
Travel - Nearest Tube is Sloane Square. Metered on-street parking is available.
Close to Karachi is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

The Art of Nuisance: Residency and Group Show Oct 8th

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 10:52:00 +0000

With Miss Pokeno's mask and the instrument of nuisance

The art of joyful disobedience!

After working in Southwark for the 'Regeneration' Department around 2006, I was disillusioned by local councils and their demonstrations of 'local good will' while gentrifying areas in the name of profit. So it was great to come back for a residency at the studio of The Sisters of Perpetual Resistance.

The result, a 5 woman show The Art of Nuisance opens October 8th 2015 in Borough, London at Sisters HQ, 8th – 23rd October 2015,
1 Doyce Street
SE1 OEU

The Art of Nuisance is a 15 day series of workshops, events and gatherings to celebrate new feminist activism. "Subverting the patronising claim by politicians of the time that militant suffragettes were merely ‘making a nuisance of themselves’, we are dedicating two weeks to rowdy art and agitation by women. This is beautifully executed discontent which you can participate in."

"Over the summer of 2015 Miss Pokeno invited five young emerging artists to the Sisters’ HQ at London Bridge to create an Instrument Of Nuisance. Each artist was given ten days and resources to interpret this brief however they chose. The resulting work will be exhibited at the opening show on the 8th of October.

Expect wayward and extravagant work from sonic artist Fari Bradley; web meddler Meg Mosley; as well as anarchist artist Cristinalina (aka Gold Peg); feminist art provocateur Sarah Maple; and still-at-art-school-but-you-just-wait Rebecca Jackson. There will be dissenters’ workshops, film nights and soup salons, not to mention inter-generational feminist arm-wrestling (sign up now), intelligent, rumbustious, joyous, gin-fuelled mayhem in the back streets of Southwark."

It is in the anarchic nature of The Art of Nuisance that events will slip and slide. Some will only be announced the day or hour before the happening. Some may not be revealed at all.

Check the website or facebook page for constant updates.

These guys were on their way to an anti-austerity march so I tooted for them

Thursday 8th October 6pm-9pm: Art of Nuisance opens the exhibition
-Sunday 11th October: Poster makeup and pasteup with Cristinalina
-Tuesday 13th October 7-9pm: screening of Just Do It – a tale of modern day outlaws – film about climate change activists directed by Emily James
-Saturday 17th October 6pm-12 midnight: #MeggyandMapes (artists Sarah Maple and Meg Mosley) host an Inter-Generational Feminist Arm-Wrestling evening
-Friday 23rd October 6pm- 12pm: Fierce Fiesta! The artists take their work to the streets ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN

Contact details:
For high res press images and interviews with artists please email: bird@misspokeno.com
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/thereturnofthesistersofperpetualresistance
Instagram: https://instagram.com/sistersofperpetualresistance/

New Radio Series - ClockTower Radio

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 16:44:00 +0000

"Anyone who is really homeless regards the habit of seeing estrangement in everything modern as an affection, a display of modish attitudes. Clutching difference like a weapon to be used with stiffened will, the exile jealously insists on his or her right to refuse to belong."

Edward Said, Reflections on Exile, 1984

This week Chris Weaver and I begin a new monthly series HEARwHERE on Clocktower Radio, New York.

Sourced during our travels, the series examines that sense of suspended place and identity one feels when transitioning a mixture of time zones, private/public spaces and geographies. For HEARwHERE we explore the creative possibilities of radio, for example in Episode 1 the narrative transitions through histories and years as well. In this first episode we juxtapose recordings made this year in Tunis with previously unheard recordings of Tunisia before the fall of Ben Ali we made in 2011, while exploring fishing villages many miles south of the usual tourist trails.

Clocktower Radio is a part of art project Clocktower, the oldest alternative art project in New York. It was begun in 1972 in Lower Manhattan by MoMA PS1 founder Alanna Heiss and the radio launched in 2003, just one year after London's Resonance104.4FM.

Lahore Biennial Residency

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 08:16:00 +0000

Chris Weaver and I have been invited on this residency, and will visit Pakistan to conduct research and create a publication.