Quinie
Performance
Fri 29 April 8pm
An Tobar
Performance will have live captioning
Pay What You Decide Book here
Quinie, aka Josie Vallely, is based in Glasgow. She sings primarily in Scots, with a style inspired by the traditions of Scottish Traveller singer Lizzie Higgins (1929-1993). Quinie’s experiments with composition and vocal techniques create a dialogue between pipe music and voice. Her work has a strong sense of place rooted in an imagined Scotland.
Recent work includes ‘Thyme Piobaireachd’, an exploration of the solo voice in dialogue with the compositional structure of the Piobaireachd. A collaboration with percussionist Laurie Pitt on snare drum, it was released on Cafe Oto’s Takuroku Label in April 2021. This year Quinie has been collaborating with a number of Scottish and Australian artists on the AC projects’s Ghost Tunes, supported by the British Council. This project considers themes of indigeneity, ancestral relationships with land and language.
For An Tobar festival, Quinie will collaborate with Harry Gorski-Brown, an artist and composer based in Glasgow. His work encompasses composition, production, audio-visual works and performance. The performance that will debut at the festival will include unaccompanied voice, as well as pipes, violin and electronics.
Daniella Valz Gen
Oracular Practice (a workshop in two parts)
Part One
Sat 30 April 11am-12.30pm
An Tobar
Pay What You Decide Book here
A clear conduit, breath and vessel
A reflective session focusing on the position and filters we bring to our meaning making strategies and the place they occupy in oracular practice. In this session we will engage in contemplative practices such as scrying as precursors of channeling through automatic writing.
Daniella Valz Gen is a poet, artist and card reader, born in Lima, Peru and based in London. Their work explores the interstices between languages, cultures and value systems with an emphasis on embodiment and ritual, through the mediums of performance, installation, conversation and text.
Valz Gen is the author of the poetry collection Subversive Economies (PSS 2018). Their prose has been published in various art and literary journals such as Lish, SALT. Magazine, Paperwork Magazine and The Happy Hypocrite amongst others. They’re currently developing the next stage of their project (be)longing, a series of immersive elemental rituals.
Valz Gen has been focusing the last two years on integrating their oracular practice with their art and poetry. They run monthly gatherings exploring poetics in relation to the symbolism of Tarot cards within the container of Sacred Song Tarot. Instagram: @daniella_vg | @sacredsongtarot
Hannah Catherine Jones
Embodied Listening Sessions
An Tobar
Sat 30 April 2-4pm
Pay What You Decide Book here
Embodied Listening Sessions is a two part workshop + performance event specially designed for An Tobar Festival. Participants will contribute to a collective sonic meditation providing the physiological grounding for a group, a listening session to a playlist exploring healing frequencies.
Informed by Dr Hannah Catherine Jones’ ongoing work with solfeggio frequencies, you can listen to her recent BBC Radio 3 documentary on this here: Healing Hertz - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013835
Artists’ Moving Image Screening
An Tobar
Sat 30 April 7pm
All films will be captioned
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This evening screening of Artists’ Moving Image is a curated programme of films from Evan Ifekoya, Linda Stupart, Grace Ndiritu and Sophia Al Maria. Exploring themes of ancestry, time travel and spiritual healing practices, these four works offer up collective moments of intimacy across different spaces and time. The body is used as a site for transmogrification, technologies of hyper-vigilance are turned into spiritual openings and the reparative dimension of sound is explored as a gateway to alternate aspects of our reality.
Linda Stupart
After The Ice the Deluge
16.27 min
The largely diptych film draws from both Stupart’s performance and research in the Arctic as well as degraded historical film, upholding traumatized bodies as uniquely positioned to comprehend and contend with climate change. Here, the ageing film’s scarring and damage manifest as a sympathetic magic which parallels that of the landscape it holds. Rather than the temporality of this demise feeling inescapably horrific, Stupart opens up the potential of transmogrification, the melted remains of the polar ice caps entering into traumatized bodies in the form of nano-particles, as a form of time travel, with the glaciers becoming part of us, merging past, present, and future.
The subtle drips and gushes add a soft urgency. The creeping realization that the soothing sounds are in fact the harbinger of climate destruction, and in turn the release of long-frozen bacteria and viruses, mirrors the steady advancement of glacial destruction itself. In Stupart’s quintessential style, they generate both horror and hope with equal profundity, positioning them not as counterpoints but as intimately joined responses and modes of being.
Dr Linda Stupart is an artist, writer, and educator from Cape Town, South Africa. They completed their PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016, with a project engaged in new considerations of objectification and abjection. They are currently a permanent lecturer at Birmingham City University, and have previously worked at University of Reading, London College of Communication, and Camberwell Arts College. They have also run arts education projects at Tate, South London Gallery, Battersea Arts Centre, and Camden Arts Centre. Linda is interested in the possibilities for writing and making discrete grounded encounters with different kinds of bodies (of knowledge, objects, affect as well as corporeal bodies) as a way to think through less alienated ways of living and thinking together. This comes out of encounters with feminist art, postcolonial, ecological, queer, and affect theory as well as embodied and object-based critical institutional encounters. Their current work consists predominately of writing, performance, film, and sculpture, and engages with queer theory, science fiction, environmental crises, magic, language, desire, and revenge. They have recently exhibited at Lisson Gallery, Raven Rown, Tate, IMT, Matt’s Gallery, and The Showroom in London; as well as Transmission in Glasgow, DISTRICT in Berlin, Kunstverein Dusseldorf, Kunstraum Niederösterreich in Vienna, and Syndicate in Cologne. They recently produced All Us Girls Have been Dead for so Long with Carl Gent for the ICA London; a play about climate change, queer sex, and Ecco the Dolphin.
Evan Ifekoya
Undercurrent 528
15.30 min
Undercurrent 528 draws on Stephen Dwoskin’s complex relationship with care, desire and everyday rituals as made visible in his vast oeuvre and reorients it from Ifekoya’s perspective. A series of invitations were sent out by Ifekoya to their extended black, queer and trans community for a dancer, a drummer, a gathering around breath and breathing and a sonic response to these images. This new video work explores the relationship between documentation and liveness, opening portals of intimacy by bringing people together through different spaces and time. It is part of a series of works exploring the reparative dimension of sound and its potential as a gateway to alternate aspects of our reality.
Evan Ifekoya is an artist and energy worker who through sound, text, moving image and performance places demands on existing systems and institutions of power, to recentre and prioritise the experience and voice of those previously marginalised. Their practice considers art as a site where resources can be both redistributed and renegotiated, whilst challenging the implicit rules and hierarchies of public and social space.
They established the collectively run and QTIBPOC (queer, trans*, intersex, black and people of colour) led Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) in 2018. Presentations in 2022 include a solo exhibition at Migros Museum, Zurich and a moving image commission with LUX in collaboration with University of Reading. They have presented exhibitions, moving image and performances across UK Europe and Internationally, most recently: Herbert Art Gallery and Museum as nominees of the Turner Prize (with B.O.S.S. 2021); Gus Fischer New Zealand (2020); De Appel Netherlands (2019) and Gasworks London (2018).
Sophia Al Maria
Tender Point Ruin
25 min
Through Arabic poetry, collective history and what artist Sophia Al-Maria calls “an assemblage of exquisite cadaver moments”, Tender Point Ruin traverses the gifts, the vulnerabilities and the detritus of art-making.
How do we make and remake ourselves? The body of Tender Point Ruin unravels through a series of aural and textual encounters. Beginning with the rogue test (a behavioural experiment using mirrors and make up from the 70s, which mapped how self recognition develops in young children) and ending with a conversation with her frequent collaborator drag performance artist Sin Wai Kin.
In many ways, the film is a companion piece to her recent video work Beast Type Song, in which she began to explore her profound loss of faith in the written form. In Tender Point Ruin, Al-Maria returns to many of the same references and texts. An essay written to reject speechlessness by Jamaican-American writer Michelle Cliff entitled Caliban’s Daughter is this time recited by American artist Kelsey Lu. Etel Adnan, whose epic 1989 poem The Arab Apocalypse, so foundational to Beast Type Song, is here cast in the role of the poet. Her gravelly voice accompanies images of the moon as she tells us of the recurring images of desolate lovers in Arabic poetry, their yearning telling us of the “tender point of a ruin.” In between, we see Umm Kulthum, the iconic Egyptian singer’s only 1970 performance in Paris, performing Al-Atlal. Describing heartbreak, the song was originally a poem by Ibrahim Nagi and its title translates as ‘the ruins’.
In a text exchange in Tender Point Ruin, Al Maria asks “wtf is the point of art?”—gesturing to the inevitability of ruination when in love with something that cannot love you back. But like the poetry that finally shores up her faith in language, the artist’s CGI renderings of future landscapes turn technologies of hyper-vigilance into spiritual openings. Cameras and pineal eyes become composite and night vision cameras give way to another world that invites us to enter into the spaces between the ruins, to wander and discover, and to reach for the moon. —Jemma Desai
Sophia Al-Maria (1983) studied comparative literature at the American University in Cairo, and aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work spans many disciplines including drawing, film and screenwriting for TV. Her cinematic videos explore postcolonial identity, imperialism, and counter-histories weaving together music, literature, oral history, film and dance. Her fractured, nonlinear works are often cast against a science fiction backdrop and explore the revision of history, the isolation of individuals through technology, and the corrosive elements of consumerism and industry. Recent solo exhibitions include Julia Stoschek Collection, (Düsseldorf, 2020), Tate Britain, (London, 2019–20) and Whitney Museum of American Art, (New York, 2016). In 2018, she was the Writer-In-Residence at Whitechapel Gallery, London and she has a forthcoming Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, (Moscow, 2021).
Grace Ndiritu
A Therapeutic Townhall Meeting: Healing the Museum
7.01 min
A Therapeutic Townhall Meeting: Healing the Museum (2016)Les Laboratoires d’AubervillierParisFor this documentation film of her new shamanic performance, Ndiritu invites both participants (actors) and audience members (spectators) to take part in A Therapeutic Townhall Meeting. Inspired by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) meetings which took place in South Africa, which were broadcast on live television as series of 96 episodes beginning in 1996 at the end of apartheid. By allowing both actors (victims) and spectators (persecutors) to meet each other on an equal platform, a normally polarized and politically charged dynamic between the two groups is nullified and a balance of power achieved, putting society and its fragmentation of the collective mind, currently being enacted through the destruction of the environment, mass human migration and global terrorism – rather than individuals, on trial.
Grace Ndiritu (Kenya/UK). She studied Textiles Art at Winchester School of Art,UK; De Ateliers, Amsterdam (1998-2000); UK studio residency at Delfina Studios, London (2004-2006) and International Residency at Recollets, Paris (2013).
Her archive of over forty ‘Hand-crafted videos' and 'Video Paintings' have been widely exhibited. Upcoming solo performances Musee Chasse & Nature and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013). Recent solo exhibitions and screenings at ICA Artist Film Survey, London (2011), Artprojx at Prince Charles Cinema London (2009), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2007), the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2005).
Group shows include those at the Bamako Biennale (2011), Dakar Biennale and International Center of Photography, New York (2009).
She won the 1st Prize for Landscape Video and Photography, at the Centre for Art and Nature, Spain (2010). Her work has been commissioned by Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool (2010), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2007), and Glynn Vivian Gallery, Wales (2006).
Her work is also housed in museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Ulrich Museum, Kansas and private collections such as the Walther Collection, New York and Germany.
Daniella Valz Gen
Oracular Practice (a workshop in two parts)
Part Two
Sun 1 May 2-4pm
AN Tobar
Pay What You Decide Book here
Divination as contemplation
This session is centred on finding tools for divination in the land. Through a series of prompts to engage with the landscape, we will gather found materials to create an ad hoc divination tool.
Hannah Catherine Jones
Embodied Listening Sessions - Performance
An Tobar Performance Room
Sun 1 May
5pm
Performance will have live captioning
Pay What You Decide Book Here
Embodied Listening Sessions is a two-part workshop + performance event specially designed for An Tobar Festival. This is the performance event of the sessions, open to everyone the performance will be documentation of the sonic meditation recorded and developed in the workshop session on the previous day.
Informed by Dr Hannah Catherine Jones’ ongoing work with solfeggio frequencies, you can listen to her recent BBC Radio 3 documentary on this here: Healing Hertz - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013835
Mele Broomes
Working Reveals: A live rendition of Wrapped Up In This
Sunday 1 May
Mull Theatre 8pm
Pay What You Decide Book here
A journey of rebirth, through a life built to care. A womxn is called upon for service, following in the footsteps of her past generation and members of the Old World. With her ancestors alongside to guide and protect her, she leads herself to the opportunity she has been waiting for. With pride, she transcends physical distance to reach her apex; her journey is euphoric, visceral, and spiritual in nature.
Duration: Approximately 25mins
Director + Performing Artist Mele Broomes
Sculpture-Costume Sabrina Henry
Textiles Design Kieran Flaherty
Costume Construction Heather Currie and Siobhan Randle
Lighting Emma Jones
Music Nwanneka Osammor, Sarra Wild + Shaheeda Sinckler
Outside Eye Ashanti Harris
Production Support Shalmali Shetty and Siân Baxter
Festival Closing Party
Sarra Wild
Doors from 9pm, performance from 10pm-12 midnight
An Tobar
Sun 1 May
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Sarra Wild is a DJ, events organiser and co-founder of Glasgow based platform, OH141. Wild throws some of Glasgow’s most forward-thinking and exciting parties, as well as providing a platform for womxn, people of colour and members of the LGBTQ+ community to be more visible in Scotland’s club and arts scene.
Sarra Wild is a co-founder of the Glaswegian night club and collective, OH141 as well as a DJ and promoter. She created OH141, a space where women, people of colour and members of the LGBTQ+ community could have fun and feel safe and accepted. Sarra’s work has been recognised by Dazed and The List’s Hot 100 where she has been nominated for her stellar activism toward creating safe spaces for queer communities, people of colour, and women!