Nina Emge spent the summer time months in an artist residency in Berlin. Inside her spacious studio on Lindowerstrasse, amidst the sweltering 30°C warmth, she begins sketching concepts for sculptures for her exhibition in Palermo. Alongside these preliminary drafts, she conducts her first spatial experiments utilizing massive items of hand-painted cotton cloth, assessments numerous supplies, and crafts her first small ceramic works. The scale of Nina’s momentary studio in Berlin coincidentally mirror these of the Officine Bellotti exhibition area in Palermo, serving to her to higher envision and adapt her work to the area. Throughout a Zoom name from Berlin, Nina shares these early sketches, arranging them on a ground plan of the Palermo venue.

Spatiality is a basic part of Nina’s inventive apply—although not within the standard sense of site-specific installations. Moderately, she approaches area as a resonance chamber, a spot for voices, sounds, music, and even silence to come back collectively. For Nina, area can be crucially a spot for listening. Her work typically engages with the sociopolitical dimensions of listening, viewing it by the lens of postcolonial and feminist theories and understanding it as an inherently political act. Whereas listening to is a passive sensory perform, merely registering sound waves by the ear, listening is an lively course of that requires consideration and intent. As composer Pauline Oliveros notes, “Listening to occurs involuntarily, listening, alternatively, is a voluntary course of that produces tradition by coaching and expertise.”¹

We will study to pay attention. And once we do, listening turns into a political, even subversive act, a method to problem entrenched energy buildings. These reflections resonate in Nina’s new works for Palermo. The time period “resonate” feels significantly apt right here, as we enter an area that capabilities like a resonance chamber—a quiet room, the place the sounds and echoes of a live performance that will have ended simply moments earlier than appear to linger within the air. As Nina describes it, “the room as a silent live performance.”

The massive cotton panels within the exhibition play an lively, acoustic position in shaping this resonance, influencing how sound strikes by the area. Painted with layers of extremely diluted acrylic paint and embroidered with glass beads, the textiles subtly vibrate. On this silence, we start to pay attention; on this silence, a brand new area for communication opens up. The sculptures—fragile and nearly natural in look—are solid from metallic and held collectively at numerous factors by tuning keys, that are used to regulate the pitch of stringed devices (the tighter the string, the upper the tone) and optimise their sound. Nina emphasises the connection between these cloth panels, which form the acoustics of the area, and the sculptures, which she refers to as “devices” which have “one thing to say.”

Within the second room, a big sculpture with 5 music stands remembers the presence of our bodies and voices. On the similar time, the sculpture additionally formulates an invite: I can place myself at one of many music stands and be part of the polyphonic choir.

Along with her work, Nina intertwines reflections on the political potential of listening—posing questions on whose voices are heard—with particular issues of music. The artist’s grandparents have been skilled musicians, and Nina has acquired a deep understanding of music principle and historical past. The bows, repurposed music stands, and tuning keys featured in her sculptures and installations spotlight listening as an intrinsic a part of music—important to its creation—whereas additionally critiquing the exclusionary mechanisms of the Western musical canon, which dictates how and what we hearken to.

On the similar time, music is profoundly linked to political actions and diasporic experiences, the place sure songs can convey political messages, embody resistance, and supply energy and solidarity. Within the Palermo exhibition, Nina incorporates paper-thin ceramic plates inscribed with lyrics and quotations from a various vary of musicians, resembling Milton Nascimento, EBOW, Tina Reden, Erykah Badu, and KRS-ONE. Many of those songs have lengthy accompanied Nina, their lyrics resurfacing in her earlier exhibitions and performances. Revisiting them for Palermo, she attracts consideration to an lively type of listening that generates reminiscence. This concept is encapsulated within the exhibition title: “Recently I’ve Been Listening Once more.” The second a part of the title, “Memorymemorymemory123!,” carries “reminiscence” inside it and highlights the significance of information, referencing Nina’s private password-creation system. It serves as a metaphorical key—very like the tuning key that holds the data of an instrument’s sound. The artist additionally connects these issues together with her understanding of the musicians she quotes within the ceramic works—musicians who’ve persistently expressed essential views, some relationship again to the Nineteen Seventies, whether or not they have been talking out in opposition to struggle or advocating for marginalised our bodies. Outfitted with this information, we will additionally perceive the tenor of the exhibition.

On the core of Nina’s work is an effort to deconstruct dominant canons and reconstruct different genealogies—amplifying beforehand unheard voices and permitting them to resonate. To hearken to their political, resistant messages. For her, these voices type a polyphonic choir that echoes all through the exhibition area—an open rating that guests can tune into and have interaction with. A choir whose voices we can’t solely hear but additionally really feel—once we really pay attention.

The Italian verb “sentire” means each “to listen to” and “to really feel”—underscoring the connection between acoustic notion and sensory expertise. Each are acts of the physique, and each can require braveness. “Listening is dangerous, it would require change from us.”²

—Gioia Dal Molin, October 2024

by Istituto Svizzero at Officine Bellotti, Palermo
till November 3, 2024