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Listening Party

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Listening Party

Hannan Jones, Sgàire Wood, Lydia Davies and Yulia Carolin Kothe

Friday 3rd November
6–9pm

Join us in the gallery for a listening party to celebrate this year’s summer broadcasts project in collaboration with Clyde Built Radio. Each of the commissioned artists will present a revised and shortened version of their original broadcasts on Clyde Built Radio.

Unfolding through June – October this year, summer broadcasts was a series of four sound commissions by Hannan Jones, Sgàire Wood, Lydia Davies and Yulia Carolin Kothe, four Glasgow-based early career interdisciplinary artists currently working with sound, poetry, broadcast, or music. Responding to the increase in the foregrounding and programming of transient methods of working and interdisciplinary art practice within a contemporary visual art context over the last few years, this new programme at David Dale Gallery seeks to continue to support these practices.

The commissioned works responded loosely to the theme of broadcast as a site for connection and reflection, and were supported with mentorship from local community radio station Clyde Built Radio. They were also broadcast on Clyde Built Radio, who are based just up the road from the gallery in the Barras Market and are all now available to listen on our website and Clyde Built Radio’s archive.

Image by Greer Lockyear.

Yulia | Julia Carolin Kothe is an artist working between Glasgow and Frankfurt am Main. Her practice moves between sculpture, film, sound, writing, installation and performance, often responding to archival material, feminist theory and personal and oral histories. Through forensic expansion of these materials, Kothe creates new sites, both digital and physical, glitching fictional or often partially-remembered environments that seek to configure new relational and temporal experiences. She regularly works collaboratively, recently undertaking a residency at CCA Creative Lab with Lisa Fabian exploring uncatalogued recorded material from the CCA and Third Eye Centre archives. Recent works have been shown at Neuer Kunstverein Mittelrhein, Neuwied (2023), French Street, Glasgow (2023), Rosa Stern, Munich (2022), Kunsthalle Mainz (2021), Queens Street Studios, Belfast (2021), POKY – Institute of Contemporary Art, Mainz (2020), ATLETIKA Gallery, Vilnius (2020), mañana bold, Offenbach/Main (2019) and Frankfurter Kunstverein (2018). She has participated in residencies at Glenkeen Garden Residency, Crespo Foundation in Frankfurt am Main and West Cork, Ireland (2023) and Hospitalfield, Arbroath (2021/22). Kothe has completed Masters degrees at both Glasgow School of Art and Kunsthochschule Mainz.

‘Poltergeist or some scene else’ is an essayistic live performance by Yulia Carolin Kothe that takes the Barras Market’s (Glasgow) syntax of artefacts as a starting point for creating an expanding and ever-evolving tableau of intense, uneasy acousmatic atmospheres. The conspicuous and omniscient narrator takes the listener on a rambling walk through the Barras entering private and public spaces, a remote cottage and various ambivalent territories home to disembodied voices and close up traces of life like a wet ring of a coffee cup just plucked from the scene.

This new piece is rich and heavy in material. Kothe’s own electronic compositions are juxtaposed with re-articulated local oral histories, chopping up DIY recordings on cassettes purchased from the Barras Market, and combining with avantgarde German poems by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927), Thekla Lingen (1866-1931), Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806) and Anna Ritter (1865–1921).

Centring the figure of the Poltergeist, Kothe explores the etymological possibilities of the word as a ghost responsible both for unruly physical disturbances and moving objects — ‘Genstände bewegen’ in German — which could be understood as ‘moving forward with a subject’, e.g. the suggestion of an unconventional idea. In this sense, the live performance lingers like a poltergeist, making metaphorical and geographical suggestions then playfully pulling out the chair from underneath you just at the last moment.

Lydia Davies is an artist and writer based in Glasgow, working across moving image, sound, and bookmaking. Lydia is preoccupied with interpersonal dynamics, bodily gestures, and the shifting registers of voice and narration. Her work draws attention to the ways in which selves are both sustained and undone through their relations. Recent projects include: CCA Glasgow Creative Lab residency, Fruitmarket artist talk, and writing commissions for projects with ho.rr Collective, Glasgow Project Room, and Intermedia Gallery (all 2023). Lydia’s books are available through Good Press, Typewronger Books, and CCA Derry~Londonderry.

For the Listening Party, Lydia Davies will share a revised and live version of her radio broadcast ‘This one’s for the’. The piece will last approximately 20 minutes. Through anecdotal dedications to the character types ‘The Hopeless Romantic’ and ‘The Phony’, this voice craves connection. The voice surges, falters and warbles, as it navigates the cutlery drawer and a difficult phone call.

Touching on longing, grief, frustration and appreciation, this playful voice frays the edges of its own words, at times with a light touch, and at times with a heavy hand. ‘This one’s for the’ considers how recurring character types connect with our deepest desires, fears, and values, and can be used to limit a person by denying their capacity to surprise us.

Hannan Jones has a research-led practice that deep dives into concepts of hybridity, rhythms, and psychogeography in response to cultural and social migration. Jones practises at the intersections of sound, sculpture, installation, and moving image. Recent presentations include: Counterflows, Glasgow (2023); Edinburgh Art Festival (2022); Sonica, Glasgow (2022); Well Projects, Margate (2022), New Radicalisms, Rotterdam (2022).

For the Listening Party, Hannan’s commissioned sonic landscape Blue Grey Haze will take an improvised approach. The piece centres sound in and around the locked groove ?, which serves as a rhythmic foundation that unfolds progressively and cyclically returns. Blue Grey Haze underpins compositions, poems and research elements, field recordings, and collected audio materials that undergo deliberate sonic shifts, amplifying the sense of constellations whilst sitting in a state of flux bound by the locked groove.

Initially, through her broadcast on Clyde Built Radio in June, Hannan explored Scannell’s concept of “the doubling of place”, the notion that radio listeners occupy two places simultaneously—the physical place where the event unfolds and the subjective place where they engage with the listening experience––embracing a non-linear approach, sitting with time as a fluid and subjective entity.

In this live setting, Hannan will work with samples, speech and delay, expanding noisily on the concept of the locked groove as a cyclical return, the abstraction of sound, oscillating currents between the personal and political, and the technical instrument: the radio.

Sgàire Wood (b. Belfast, 1993) is an Irish artist and performer based in Glasgow. Ranging from sculpture and installation to elaborate dance and spoken word performance, Wood’s practice utilises artifice and anachronism to achieve moments of authenticity and facetiously deconstruct societal taboos around mental illness, trans identity, intimacy, trauma and sexuality.

Alongside a condensed presentation of the original radio show featuring bacchanalian nightlife field recordings and candid interviews on the nature of interpersonal shame, Sgàire Wood’s live ASMHalf-Hour is an interactive performance of radical vulnerability with an aim to comfort, existentially reassure and most importantly guide the audience into a very real state of hopelessly disarmed relaxation.