When You Hear The Whistle: An Election-Eve Sanctuary/Freakout Zone
2020 is unfathomable. And right now, in the USA, we are having a surreal election season: There is dog whistling and at the same time, we are each like teakettles, building up heads of steam full of information we can’t keep track of, with only flatscreen versions of our friends and families to turn to for comfort. Unknowns fill more and more pages of our calendars as the minutes of our clocks bend.... We peer into fog trying to find some clarity—or are we just learning how to find comforting patterns in swirling steam?
Join Sholeh Asgary and Heather Kapplow on November 3rd when you hear the whistle of your own internal teakettle or sense dog whistling around you right below audibility. We will be holding open a long, swirling, mostly non-verbal Zoomspace to take communal respite within during election eve on both the East and West Coasts of the USA. Feel free to drop in and out as many times as you like between 6pm EST to 8pm PST. (Note that this is a 5-hour span of time. On the East Coast of the USA the event will occur from 6pm - 11pm, and on the West Coast of the USA, it will occur between 3pm - 8pm.)
This is a space to cast all of your non-transmittable feelings as the absurdity/horror of this peak moment of political theater unfolds in real time. We’ll be there to honor your impulses: to scream, to crawl under a blanket, to drink heavily, etc. When You Hear The Whistle is a location for the energy you can’t put anywhere else on election eve to build up, build up, build up, release, release, release, keep moving, keep moving, keep swirling.
Through text, gestural, and sound prompts, Asgary and Kapplow (in collaboration with AMP and AMP,) will keep a portal open for you to pop in and out of as much as you’d like to.
Please register via this link to receive instructions for participation.
This event is co-presented by Arab.AMP and Art Market Provincetown.
ABOUT US:
Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian born interdisciplinary sound artist, educator and organizer, who creates immersive works, performances, and audience participatory workshops and scores with a particular interest in liminal spaces experienced by the viewer. Utilizing the parameters of various media, such as sound, video, light, time and photography, she resurfaces the viewer’s relationship to space, in order to address the way objects can create disambiguation and break down representation. Asgary is based in Oakland, CA.
Heather Kapplow is a self-trained conceptual artist based in the United States (Boston, MA.) Kapplow creates participatory experiences that elicit unexpected intimacies using objects, alternative interpretations of existing environments, installation, performance, writing, audio and video. Many of Kapplow’s projects are developed collaboratively with other artists or with the general public/audiences.
Together, Asgary and Kapplow are engaged in an ongoing, audience-participatory, collaborative exploration using prompts and immersion in sense and process within the context of Zoom gatherings to disambiguate image from experience, making space for the unresolved. Lived social experience is indeterminate and has stuff—a sense of timing, nuances of body language, cultural norms—that doesn’t encode into technologically mediated interactions. What’s perceived as noise in digispace is often important information in physical life. Using simple strategies to bypass conventional communication so that gesture, sound and movement can transmit as it emerges directly from intuition, Asgary and Kapplow’s exercises resist their interfaces of transmission, subverting technology’s capacity to contain us. By modeling possibility and buying time for things to emerge that are beyond current imagination, we remind ourselves and each other that interfaces can be adapted, broken down, changed if their limitations are made visible.
Arab AMP is a platform for EXPERIMENTAL LIVE ART, Music and ideas from THE SWANA [South West Asia North Africa] diaspora and our allied communities.
Art Market Provincetown: AMP is a live contemporary gallery space dedicated to exhibiting multi-disciplined work by visual, conceptual, performance artists, filmmakers and writers. Exhibitions & Happenings are primarily cutting-edge, and often process-based.