56th Venice Biennale: Safina Radio Project
Safina Radio Project
56th Venice Biennale
May 2015
with Fiona Hallinan & Oscar Ho
A phone call, a composition, a conversation and an occurrence connecting Istanbul, Hong Kong and Venice through water, ferries, transience and the temporary communities that form when we embark on journeys and go through periods of transition. Titled after the first line of a poem by Joseph Knecht, the main character of Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game.
A phone call with artist Fiona Hallinan about Heterodyne, her series of site-specific audio pieces that are scored to accompany journeys, and a presentation of Heterodyne: Bosphorus, an original score created for a Bosphorus ferry crossing from Eminönü to Kadıköy in Istanbul, Turkey. The score was composed by Peter Broderick, an Oregon-based composer and musician, and is now available to stream on the Heterodyne mobile app. Listeners are allowed one play anywhere in the world, and can only listen more if they are within 30km of the ferry crossing. More information is available here: http://www.heterodyneprojects.com
A conversation with curator Oscar Ho about change in Hong Kong while waiting to board the Star Ferry to cross Victoria Harbour from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui. He is currently working with students and faculty from the Chinese University of Hong Kong on an exhibition, film screening, and performance festival featuring work by artists, photographers and the local community relating to the history and ongoing resonance of social movements in Hong Kong.
About the Safina Radio Project
Commissioned by Alserkal Avenue and curated by Anabelle de Gersigny, the Safina Radio Project is an itinerant space, a boat transformed into a recording studio that navigates the waterways of Venice, transporting passengers from one place to another, acting as a roving platform for conversation and exchange. The project is realized through the kind support of Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, Founder of Alserkal Avenue.
The radio space becomes one for binding different realities and experiences – with participants and listeners prompted by ideas of utopia and oppression, accelerationism, borders, time, trade and surveillance. A combination of travelogues (conversations) and performative works will interrogate artistic practices, inviting a broad spectrum of artists whose practices draw from a variety of social and political contexts.
The project creates transitory and transient communities with each journey, bringing focus to collective experience and privileging the participants and listeners – targeting an investigation into how we locate ourselves and how we mediate our human and historic commonality.
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No permanence is ours; we are a wave – Part 1 | The Bosphorous
No permanence is ours; we are a wave – Part 2 | Victoria Harbour
