water
Haig Aivazian
Through media such as lectures, performance, video, drawing, installation, and sculpture, Haig Aivazian’s multifaceted works intricately blend the personal and the geopolitical as well as micro and macro narratives. They uncover or perhaps even fabricate complex threads, timelines and visual networks with multiple layers of meaning and ambiguity. His stories are intended to puzzle, reveal intangible connections, and evoke a sense of ghostly friction among conflicting ideas. In this podcast, we talk to Haig Aivazian about counter-propaganda, sports, blackouts, Palestine, fugitivity and what he calls “the dumping grounds of democracy”.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some outtakes from our conversation with South African artist Sethembile Msezane, who riffs on our disconnection from nature. Movement, water, ancestry and spirituality also come up, along with some side notes on the different types of relationships that institutions and public space make possible.
Sarah Nuttall
Over the past 10 years, South African scholar Sarah Nuttall's work has focused on post-colonial criticism, urban theory and literary and cultural studies, especially in relation to Africa and its diasporas. Her current area of interest revolves around water, heavy rainfall, flooding and hydrocolonialism, and how they intersect with materiality, time and daily life. But also around how water can be traced and analysed across works of literary fiction from the African continent. ‘Pluviality’, the umbrella term she coined for this purpose, serves as a conceptual framework and a methodological approach to her study of rain in an era of extreme climate emergency.
Sethembile Msezane
Working from the foundations of historical narrative and its constructs, African knowledge systems, and a contemporary take on colonial wounds, South African artist Sethembile Msezane has an interdisciplinary practice that goes beyond critique. In this podcast, Sethembile talks about her rejection of modern throwaway culture, convinced that the history and experiences of ancestors contain clues and know-how that allow us to imagine different futures. She believes that good omens must enter through spirituality and dialogue with ancestors. Art is simply a tool.
Edwin van der Heide
Artist, composer and researcher Edwin van der Heide expands musical composition and musical language in spatial, interactive, and interdisciplinary directions. His often site-specific, highly immersive installations don’t just take up space: they are a very deliberate inquiry into space itself and into its affordances as an artistic medium and material. Edwin’s pieces create space, modifying its actual and perceived boundaries. They make space present, apparent, and even tangible. In this podcast, we talk to Edwin about art in public space, air pressure, sounds under water, loudspeakers, networks, odd spatial experiences, and sonic phenomenology.