Release:
The Exhibition
ACAC, Arad, Israel
January 10, 2025- April 5, 2025
In conclusion of the special artist residency program “Release” for the art of sound, voice, and frequencies.
Artists: Haim Vitali Coen, Mor Leedor, David Lemoine, Yoel Peled, Dafna Kaffeman
Co Curator: Guy Dubious
Over the past year, we held a special artist residency program focused on sound, frequencies and voice. We based it on the desert/urban location as one that calls for unique, site-specific creation challenging the senses and, perception of the environment, and as one that features unique sonic processes. We envisioned it as a space of listening, through which one can characterize observation, orientation, positioning, exploration, gathering, and survival. This place does not present itself directly or easily. Beneath its surface, significant processes and changes—both natural and cultural—are constantly occurring. It is an environment that invites the sense of hearing to sharpen and unravel, allowing us to focus on the mechanisms of listening (such as gathering, clarification, composition, amplification, and erasure) and on its meaning. We issued an open call in which we wrote, among other things:
The Hebrew language distinguishes between three types of sensory engagement with the sonic space: hearing, listening, and attentiveness. Hearing indicates the innate bodily dimension connected to the evolutionary process of each species. Listening is an active process that shapes a sonic object (we listen to a lecture, an enemy, a concert); while attentiveness exists between the biological fact (the natural) and the technological action (the cultural), which constantly disciplines the sonic world. Attentiveness turns the meeting between the biological/natural and cultural/technological into a space of multifaceted activity, where the sharp division of language and thought softens, and other possibilities arise.
Five artists were selected to participate in the program, spending time in Arad throughout the year, both individually and as a group. Each artist explored, through their unique artistic practice and engagement with the city and desert, the artistic act as a form of listening and attentiveness. During the residency, local and international artists as well as city residents conducted workshops, meetings, and tours with the artists.
The events of the war left their mark on those meetings, a mark that was often experienced as silence. These were significant and interesting moments: we were able to observe and listen to the background noise of this struggle. Moments of hesitation, of someone trying to choose their words, and through the act of clarification, the words disappeared, leaving only silence. Thus, listening became more political. Is this a late need, expressing the current urgency of time?
The artistic research processes began for all participants with the question: how can this coexist now? "This"—the initial concept of the artistic project on one hand, and the catastrophic situation on the other. The need to give testimony was so strong that it was present in almost every conversation. But can we find this testimony here among the works? The French writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot wrote about catastrophe, asserting that its power lies not in its occurrence, but in the fact that it passed us by, leaving us alive, witnessing, and mute.
The first group meeting included a workshop with artist Nadav Assor. One of the significant moments was when he gave us an exercise: to think/invent/create a way to listen to inaudible processes happening around us. For example, changes occurring in nature, processes that are measured in thousands or millions of years. These processes seem fixed and unchanging, but only from a limited human perception. In this exercise, we considered what exists far beyond the limits of the audible. There, we encountered the need for technology. In fact, we encountered a dependence on technology in every dialogue between humans and the environment. And in the context of the environment and the catastrophic present—can we give ear to an unknown and unimaginable future? One that we will not be able to experience due to distance? Such sounds are not possible in our time, and yet they still exist.
One of the things we discovered along the way is a shared form of listening, one that paradoxically involves a sense of distance. In other words, it is a kind of listening that offers something almost contrary to direct contact, which reveals a sense of intimacy even in public situations (like the lifeguard’s call “Hey you!”—the secret power of the auditory effect lies in the threshold it creates for anyone who listens). The intention is not distant, evasive, or distracted listening, but listening that has distance, offering different ways of wandering. It doesn’t bask in its encompassing power; rather, it is related to a state of avoidance or incapacity, which more than anything indicates the climate in which we exist at the moment.
