Born in 1989, Amalia Soto, working under the pseudonym Molly Soda, has developed an extensive body of online art analysing digital cultures, specifically the mechanisms of self-exposure on the internet. Whether through self-filmed videos, GIF files or interventions on social networks, Molly Soda explores the relationship between private and public life that structures the digital image of young contemporary women. In a work that subverts these platforms, she hijacks or amplifies the particularly gendered codes of amateur online productions, adapting historical feminist artistic strategies to the contemporary media landscape.

Me Singing Stay by Rihanna, created in 2018, exemplifies her exploration of the bedroom culture, and on the articulation between public and private life that marks the generation of digital natives. The work deals with amateur practice of making covers of popular songs, both contemporary and older, online, face-to-face, predominantly by solo women. Molly Soda synchronised dozens of performances of Rihanna's Stay to reflect on the emotional power of music and the standardisation of intimacy. In a mosaic of melancholy portraits, she shifts from the solitary individual to the community, from self-portraits to the chorus, and from amateurism to the music industry.

Philippe Bettinelli

Born in 1987 in Yunyang, a district of Chongqing, Tao Hui creates immersive video installations in which he closely examines and depicts movements that transcend geographical, cultural and identity boundaries. He explores themes such as the relationship between society and the individual, and the forgotten reality of marginalised communities.

The narratives that Tao Hui imagines for his works are based on memories, whether personal, collective or simply invented, and encourage viewers to reflect on their own social and cultural histories. In Pulsating Atom, the artist addresses the frenzy of social networking, in particular the global success of TikTok, which allows users to view, produce, reproduce and share short videos. The installation combines images of a gala singer, played by a Chinese opera singer, with film clips that have no real connection, just like the people who interact with each other through videos posted on the app. In this way, and as the title suggests, Pulsating Atom reflects the atomisation of society, and the dissonance between the increasing exchanges that take place and the growing sense of loneliness. By juxtaposing these disparate sources, Tao Hui highlights the paradox of these online productions, which offer TikTok users a simulated, ultra-connected reality in which they ultimately find themselves isolated – alone despite being surrounded by others.

Nicolas Ballet

The unique contemporaneity inherent in Hassan Khan’s artistic creation stems from his ability to ingeniously immerse the audience in multilayered spatio-temporal and textual contexts. His work is often a fusion of various elements composed of still and moving images, sculptures, objects, texts, music and performance. For Khan, these elements not only convey pure, personal feelings but also lead to multiple interpretations that allow one to extract cultural patterns and systematic structures from their complexity, while perceiving the characteristic synchronicity and coexistence in different facets of space and time. From macro narratives to individual lives, these elements fully embody the core spirit of "the personal is political".

Music is one of Hassan Khan's main creative mediums, mixed with high art, popular taste, pop culture and subculture. Techniques of sound generation and the results of these audio cultures are reproduced or recreated. This deliberate process allows the audience to assimilate into the scenario while retaining the ability to think dialectically, triggering reflection on the problems deeply embedded in identity, community, tradition, difference, variation, cultural symbols, time and the evolution of civilization.

At the beginning of Jewel (2010), Khan places the audience in the midst of deep oceanic darkness with an ancient creature－ the anglerfish. This glowing fish gradually emerges from the darkness and sways with the music. Powerful high and low frequency sounds surge like waves pushing the tide of time. As the audience’s vision becomes clearer, the silhouette of this ancient creature emerges, surrounded by points of artificial blue light. The audience then sees a self-rotating technical object on the screen: an audio speaker. To psychedelic harmonies and rhythms, two modernly dressed men appear and dance around the speaker. The dance is inspired by Khan’s glimpse of everyday life as he once walked the streets of Cairo, and the music accompanying the performance is derived from the local popular music genre of electro-shaabi. Without the backdrop of the city streets, the dance around the speaker looks like a ritual, as if the two men are embracing the intangible unknown as they worship time, materiality and civilization.

Amy Cheng

Over the past fifteen years, Liu Chuang’s protean body of work has focused on the rapidly changing environment of China. His famous series of found objects, Buying everything on you, begun in 2006, is the result of conversations and transactions the artist initiated with young people looking for work when they arrived in the city of Shenzhen, a former fishing village that in the space of three decades has become a metropolis of over twelve million people. Liu Chuang’s most recent works take as their starting point the transformations of the territory associated with the production of electrical energy and the extraction of rare metals.

Produced in 2018, the audiovisual installation Gluttonous Me was conceived at the same time as the video triptych Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities, using the same materials. Composed of digital video and an old-fashioned domestic sound and image broadcasting device, the work immediately reveals a subtle technological dyschrony. His imaginary narrative weaves together science fiction films, ethnomusicological sources and archive footage reminiscent of the dissemination of pop music in large urban areasi. While the equipment testifies to the last days of analogue high fidelity, the image at its centre, almost like an altar, makes extensive use of digital morphing to create an unstable, plastic vision in constant evolution. Real landscapes take on a dreamlike quality, and depictions of aliens in films by Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977) or James Cameron (Avatar, 2009) mingle with faces evocative of distant tribes.

Resembling the dashboard of a spaceship, Liu Chuang’s assemblage recalls the late distribution of television and stereo music in the remote mountainous regions of southern China, using obsolete or second-hand equipment. The ethnic minorities he portrays in his work seem to have a relationship with technology that is both magical and utopian. The use of mirrors creates infinite reflections, adding to the magnetic attraction of a floating space-time where folk songs, futuristic fantasies and archives of a possible musical sociology come together.

Marcella Lista
 

The disparate nature of contemporary urban realities, shaped by migratory flows and the ongoing effects of globalisation, is at the heart of Emeka Ogboh's work.  

What do we hear in this installation? A voice. Or rather the same voice divided in two, here and there. It speaks in numbers and names, in places that are everywhere, as if we were on a journey, in truth a journey of many. And yet nothing moves. As we move gently around the room, as we approach the boxes hanging like paintings on the walls, we realise that the voices are coming from there, that the black circles in the middle of the yellow wooden planks are loudspeakers, which we can see vibrating if we move a bit closer. Two lively, eloquent tableaux inhabited by a voice that travels from one place to another, crossing landscapes that we have to deduce from the names spoken.

On either side of the central circles, two parallel black lines divide the yellow wooden planks in half. This is the distinguishing feature of the buses that run between Lagos, Nigeria’s capital and a megalopolis port, and the neighbouring country of Niger. From Lagos to Niamey, the Niger’s capital, there are almost 1,200 kilometres of road and an entire country to cross. The voice is that of a bus driver. And we understand that this voice is our guide on this motionless journey. The names of the places being called out are the stages of the journey. For those who are used to making the journey, they are colourful images fed by memories. For those from elsewhere, they are words in a foreign language, Yoruba, but if we linger long enough, the meaningless chain becomes a litany, an involuntary case of sound poetry – Bernard Heidsieck’s La Poinçonneuse suddenly comes to mind, and the stations of the Paris metro are superimposed on those of the Nigerian buses.

Bastien Gallet

Traversing a range of settings from urban to rural and even venturing into the remotest desert regions of the globe, Zhou Tao has used film as a privileged tool to observe the social and environmental changes of his time. Since his first videos in 2003, he has paid particular attention to body language. In his subtly constructed images, the landscape becomes a set, an artificial vision imbued with enigmatic signs. Each place, each site, presents a multiplicity of perspectives, “folds” that encompass the myriad trajectories and meanings inherent in reality.

The ancient Chinese proverb “when the chicken talks to the duck” refers to the inability to understand each other, the difficulty of communication in the absence of a shared language. Zhou Tao makes use of this popular idiom in a video filmed in a park in Guangzhou. The work presents the staging of a group of men perched in trees in the middle of the night, imitating with remarkable precision the cries of various farm animals. Moving freely from one cry to another, the range of sounds creates a breathtaking performance. Using a lightweight camera designed for night vision, the artist infiltrates this unexpected chorus, capturing with stark intensity the impassive faces and guttural thrusts of those who utter this score of animal sounds. By relocating this sonic landscape from the countryside to the heart of a major metropolis, he also evokes the population migration associated with China's economic growth. The subjective, rudimentary camerawork and the combination of precision and improvisation of the naked voices give this moment a dreamlike quality. This vibrant and colourful scene challenges the notion of an ordinary reality that is anonymous, invisible and silent. 

M.L.

Francis Alÿs did not become an artist until the age of thirty. His work includes painting, drawing, photography and video. After moving to Mexico City in 1986, he traveled to numerous marginal cities in South America, North Africa and the Middle East, even visiting war zones, refugee camps and historical ruins. Alÿs has a background in architecture and worked in urban planning in Venice. As a result, his artistic practice has always been concerned with social issues and living space. While Alÿs’ videos have a documentary character, the minstrel that resides within him always looks at things from a refined and profound perspective, allowing the audience to fully experience the essence of life and survival in different environments and specific geopolitical circumstances.

Alÿs works are often collaborative. His most famous, Children's Games (1999-today), captures images of children from different regions playing in the public space; the viewers’ emotions and consciousness navigate the intimate yet shared situations created by the games children play, which also metaphorically implied the power structures hidden in practices of social spatialization, and the harmony or violence that could be brought about by its political nature.

In 1999, in Venice, Alÿs produced Duett, a video recording of a behavioral process that becomes a performance. This collaboration with artist Honoré d'O demonstrates the consistent connotations and trajectories of Alÿs’ work, including the starting point and end, randomness and rules. In the video, A and B set off from two sides of Venice, carrying the upper and lower parts of a tuba on their backs, and try to find each other. Only when they meet can the instrument be assembled and played. Alÿs treats this premise as a “musical composition”, and its completion depends on a certain degree of improvisation and chance. A and B stroll through the narrow streets of Venice, listening to the chirping of birds, boat engines and the din of the city. After about two days, A and B finally find each other and achieve the goal of the “ensemble”: After assembling the tuba, B plays a single note for as long as he can, while A holds his breath and applauds.

Amy Cheng

Through poetry, performance, and installation, Anne Le Troter's sound work explores the mechanisms of language. Focusing primarily on sociolects, the dialects of a particular social class or professional group, her works are made up of words that have been collected, cut up, and reassembled.

In Parler de loin ou bien se taire (“At distance speak, or hold your tongue”), Le Troter created portraits of anonymous people on the basis of 400 interviews conducted by a sperm bank with its donors as well as comments by the business’ employees. The artist shows how, within a body of work, word choice, syntax, and intonation transformed the donors into stereotyped, ‘marketable’ characters. The resulting sound composition, described by the artist as a "pre-adolescent nursery rhyme, naïve and intoxicating", engenders a sense of confusion: the voices seem to evoke a single person rather than several hundred individuals.

As is often the case with the artist's work, the sound piece unfolds within an installation conceived as a collective listening environment. The sound is diffused by loudspeakers placed on rotating trays, so that the cables connecting them stretch and relax as if in a breathing movement. Conjuring up an imaginary world that is both organic and medical, this space responds to the artist's desire to give "the spoken word a territory and a body".

Philippe Bettinelli

Although Yuko Mohri’s works are at first glance identifiable as installations, assemblages or sculptures, the concept of “event” is fundamental to her artistic vision. Since graduating from the Intermedia Art Department at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2006, the artist has been developing animated reconfigurations of everyday objects that border on choreography and performance. Her work focuses on recasting ordinary objects and ready-made materials to create distinctive ensembles. An heir to the experimental artists of the international Fluxus group in the 1970s, Yuko Mohri creates assemblages that are often unconventional and occasionally dysfunctional, characterised by a delicate balancing act.

Parade presents a dramaturgy of disparate, second-hand objects and musical instruments that come together to form an unexpected orchestra. A leopard print on a synthetic skin serves as a score that is continuously “read” by sensors, just as a music box reads strips of paper punched with holes for each note. Through a motorised mechanism, the installation generates a sequence of movements and amplified sounds. Tones, timbres and textures seem to create a conversation between these objects, which are at times triumphant, plaintive or hirsute, reminding us that the search for harmony in discrepancy is a task that must be constantly renewed. Humour and a sense of the absurd are also part of what the artist calls her “ecosystems”, autonomous entities that recreate the accidents and coincidences of life. 

M.L.

Trained in composition, philosophy and gender studies, Samson Young has developed a protean body of work that encompasses music and sound creation, installation, video and performance. His work is particularly attentive to the tensions, gaps and misunderstandings that exist between the audible and the inaudible. His video series Muted Situations, begun in 2014, comprises twenty-two works to date. It follows a unique protocol: inviting the chosen performers to perform a piece of music or dance by depriving it of the intentional sounds that characterise it.

In this case, each instrument in a passage from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony has been “prepared” to muffle the sound. As the music disappears, the richly synchronised gestures of the concert are revealed, creating a different sonic landscape in which the clacking of keys, the rustling of scores and the rubbing of bows on strings that have been prevented from vibrating mingle. The work seems to echo a whole conceptual tradition of silence as music, of which John Cage's 4'33'' from 1952 is a manifesto, but while Cage invited us to contemplate the sounds of the world, Samson Young's approach is very different. He exposes the underlying systems that govern the writing and performance of music, allowing us to reflect on the hierarchical principles inherent in all representation. “Mute is not silence,” he explains. “Muting is not the same as doing nothing. Rather, the act of muting is an intensely focused re-imagination and re-construction of the auditory. It involves the conscious suppression of dominant voices; as a way to uncover the unheard and the marginalized, or to make apparent certain assumptions about hearing and sounding.”  The spatialisation of sound through twelve floor-level loudspeakers immerses the audience in the intimacy of the orchestra. Samson Young manifests the activity of each musician equally, offering up an unsuspected world of subtle sounds in which the codes and rites of the classical concert are laid bare.

Marcella Lista