Jenna Burchell’s travelling project Homing, launches at the 2014 National Arts Festival
Jenna Burchell’s travelling exhibition project Homing, is in full production and will be launching at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival on the 3rd of July. The travelling project Homing encourages audiences to talk about what home means to them in the context of diaspora. It is an opportunity to move diverse people to interact and exchange their stories, embracing the differences and similarities that unite South Africans. This hand-built interactive environment has been designed by Burchell with the aim to be an accessible meeting of contemporary art, sound and live interactive participation.
The Homing project is an installation comprising of hundreds of copper strings strung from floor to ceiling. As the viewer moves through the field of cords they interact with the artwork, they touch, listen and play. Each cord is touch sensitive, with pre-recorded sounds which Burchell describes as “memories of home”. There are dogs barking, laughter, thunder, traffic, a piano – “wherever you may be today, wherever you may live, each string of my touch-sensitive instrument Homing, triggers familiar sounds that take you back to that place - real or imagined - where you know you belong, feel safe, breathe easily” says Burchell.
The soundscapes presented at each exhibition are uniquely recorded and collected with the local community two weeks prior to a show. Some of these memories, conversations and ambient sounds are heard raw, others processed into intricate musical tones. The current soundscape is played alongside the previous exhibition’s soundscape, thereby allowing the audience to move and play between the two. The National Arts Festival will hold the soundscape drawn from Pretoria and Grahamstown. Grahamstown based sound engineer Sebastian Jamieson has worked in collaboration with Burchell in producing the Grahamstown soundscape.
There has been a positive response to Burchell’s Homing project and the interactions with sound, touch and memory. The project has received large support and has been funded by the National Arts Festival, the Ithuba Arts Fund, Walro Flex (copper pigtail), Astro Aluminium (aluminium ceiling) and the Lovell Gallery. Burchell has also received in kind and pro bono support from A Skyline on Fire (audio processing, Pretoria), Sebastian Jamieson (audio processing, Grahamstown), Leinster Grimes (electronic engineering) , Schalk Erasmus (installation consultant), Granger Scholtz (videography), Maldwyn Greenwood (audio equipment) and Bushveld Labs (electronic equipment and software engineering).
The project will be touring from the Grahamstown National Arts Festival to Johannesburg, where a sample of the work will be shown at the Turbine Art Fair, in the Turbine hollow from the 18th to 20th of July. After the end of its Johannesburg showing the project will travel to Cape Town where it will be installed at the Lovell Gallery from the 31st of July to the 13th of September.
GALLERY TIMES
National Arts Festival, Grahamstown.
3rd - 13th of July 2014
Rhodes School of Art Studio Gallery
09:00 - 17:00 Daily
Walkabouts at venue 5 July 12:00 / 7 July 14:00 / 10 July 10:00.
Contact Festival booking office to book for walkabouts
(NAF will hold a soundscape of Pretoria and Grahamstown)
For media enquiries please contact Art Source South Africa:
Kelly McErlean
Kelly@artsourcesouthafrica.co.za
072 600 7709
