Clash Of Gods – photography by Thomas Burkhalter

Photography

Thomas Burkhalter

Photography

Thomas Burkhalter

Clash Of Gods Backstage – photography by Thomas Burkhalter

Clash Of Gods at Schlachthaus Bern – photography by Thomas Burkhalter

Photography

Thomas Burkhalter

Clash of Gods

Photo Series

by Thomas Burkhalter

«Clash of Gods» is theatre, dance, DJ-set and audio-visual media collage. The performance by Thomas Burkhalter and Christophe Jaquet leads midst into the battle for cultural, political, moral interpretations and definitions of our world. Two gods clash over the state of the world. They use all means that the stage offers to overcome the others arguments: dancers, lights, sounds, language, photography, and video. At times war is total. No moral rules seem to stop these two from attacking, weakening, denigrating and ridiculing the other. Never underestimate the power of the two gods. Welcome to the theatre of our time. A reflection about the role of the researcher in today’s globalized and digitzed world. And an excursion into what James Clifford (1988) calls Ethnographic Surrealism: «Making the Familiar Strange».

Click on the title image to explore the photo series.

«On a reflective journey of a privileged white man. What can be your role in this redefining phase. I think your role can only be a humble one. Take the back seat and feel privileged of taking that back seat. Enjoy the view while recognizing all the luggage that you may bring with you. And if you have ways of making things visible. Ask how you can be of use. You’re not driving here. And you’re lucky to be enjoying the view. Be curious. Be open-minded. Have your eyes wide open, your ears wide open. So don’t try to come with good willing intentions because those good willing intentions are loaded with history, genealogy of violence and authoritarianism that goes beyond you. So yeah, take the back seat and feel privileged for enjoying the view.» – Jenny Mbaye

Biography

Dr. Thomas Burkhalter is an anthropologist/ethnomusicologist, AV-artist, and writer from Bern (Switzerland). He is the founder and director of Norient and the Norient Festival (NF), co-directed AV-performances and documentary films (e.g. «Contradict», Berner Filmpreis 2020 + Al-Jazeera Witness), and is the author and co-editor of several books (e.g., «Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut», Routledge, «The Arab Avant Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East», Wesleyan University Press). He teaches regularly at universities, and runs workshops for arts institutions. Since 2022 he produces the Norient Mixtape for Swiss National Radio SRF3. Currently, he is working on his new music duo «Melodies In My Head», and on the podcast series «Long Take: Life as an Artist». Follow him on Instagram, Research Gate, Academia.edu, Bandcamp, Spotify, or Meta.

Published on March 14, 2019

Last updated on May 01, 2024

Ethnomusicology

Performance

Power

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The versatile American soprano Anne-Kathryn Olsen performing live at Maerz Musik Festival Berlin in 2019 (photo: Sumugan Sivanesan).

Frederic Rzewski on his piano at Maerz Musik Festival Berlin in 2019 (photo: Sumugan Sivanesan).

Xin at Maerz Musik Festival Berlin in 2019 (photo: Sumugan Sivanesan).

Liping Ting performing & Huang Tim’s «Material Matano» in the background at Maerz Musik Festival Berlin in 2019 (photo: Sumugan Sivanesan).

Here-Now and There-Then

Photo Series

by Sumugan Sivanesan

Photography is a signifier of time, says our author, the anti-disciplinary artist, researcher and writer Sumugan Sivanesan. In his photo series on the 2019 edition of «The Long Now» – the thirty-hours closing event of the Berlin-based Maerz Musik festival – he emphasizes light by tracing the corporeal relations between performer, audience, and architecture.

Click on the title image to explore the photo series.

The Long Now, the culmination of the MaerzMusik festival, occurred over thirty hours at Kraftwerk, Berlin, in cooperation with Berlin Atonal. Under the directorship of Berno Odo Polzer since 2015, Maerz Musik has developed from being a showcase of new compositional and avantgarde music to become a «festival for time issues» with an expanded program of lectures, workshops, screenings, panels and installations alongside concerts. Kraftwerk, a former power station for East Berlin built in the 1960s, was revived in 2006 as part of the Tresor club’s complex of venues and is renown for its atmosphere and acoustics.

From Dusk to Strobe

Bathing in textured sound at the 2019 The Long Now in late March 2019, I was struck how each act was enhanced by a specific lighting concept. Departing from the dusk-lit queue I entered Kraftwerk enchanted by the solo voice of Anne-Kathryn Olsen. Following her voice up the stairs, I found her performing in a corridor between rows of still empty camp beds, lit by spots which produced two shadows like a sundial. A school of synchronised spots rotated above turntable artist Shiva Feshareki, sweeping her audience in hues of blue, gold and green. Percussionist Eli Keszler was lit up in a circular array of clean white light, the audience appreciating his dexterous stick work which shuttered the gleam of drum kit chrome. Soprano singer Stine Janvin in collaboration with designer Morten Joh premiered a vocal and light performance. Obscured by fog, Janvin’s shrill processed voice ricocheted into the peaks and corners of the cavernous space. A powerful strobe blinded many of her audience who turned away dazed, while others peered through their smartphone screens.

A Space Lobster from Hell

Frederic Rzewski performed around lunchtime on the Sunday, which was lost on those of us who had stayed inside for the full program and had scrambled our circadian sense of time. At first the senior composer voiced his frustration at the incessant muffled throb from Tresor next door, which rumbled the walls is shared with Kraftwerk. Nevertheless he persevered in a virtuoso show, his black suit morphing with the black piano, his shock of silver hair glared under a single spot. Well into the Sunday afternoon local digital producer Xin, appearing as a «space lobster from hell» perched behind their laptop, let loose the first beats of the program, which rattled around the industrial sized cavern now pulsing in swollen-red light.

In the last hours of The Long Now, artist Liping Ting emerged from the shadows on Kraftwerk’s lower floor. Over a focused performance that lasted some hours and with a long piece of wood balanced on her head and rolling a feather between her lips, Ting drew in onlookers to hold her weight in thin strips of elastic which she stretched to their limits. She kept apace to the slow melting ice of Huang Tim’s sculptural installation, «Material Matano». Comprised of objects suspended in ice and hung like pendulums from ropes that dropped several floors from the former-factory’s roof, they dramatised the time of the event and the scale of the building.

Photography as a Signifier of Time

Although a long way from the durée of photochemical exposure, development and printing, photography remains a signifier of time. Arguably, digital pictures are representative of the ubiquitous and instantaneous production of images nearing the speed of light, as they traverse the planet along fibre-optic cables; expanding photo-alchemy as a world-wide communications infrastructure. While this selection of images also inevitably frames time, they emphasise light, tracing the corporeal relations between performer, audience, and architecture.

Biography

Sumugan Sivanesan is an anti-disciplinary artist, researcher and writer based in Berlin. Follow him on his Website.

Published on June 18, 2019

Last updated on April 09, 2024

Performance

Perception

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Photo series «Shizophonia» by Dylan Culhane

Shizophonia

Photo Series

by Dylan Culhane

In this photo series South African photographer Dylan Culhane stages artist Umlilo in collage portraits and evokes a sense of multiplicity. A photo series from the Norient book Seismographic Sounds (see and order here).

Click on the title image to explore the photo series.

Umlilo is a natural performer and has a unique persona; as a photographer, I guess that combination is what drew me towards him. His music is so fluid in terms of style, genre, and gender to the point that it defies any single interpretation. I find that this idea pervades most of my collage portraits; we’re all such complex beings that a single moment can hardly be said to define us. A sense of multiplicity – of being more than one thing at any given time – is the prevailing narrative of our age, and thus presenting people in this way is arguably more honest than a standard head and shoulders snapshot. I also like the authenticity of working with my hands and paper and paint and glue, for no other reason than it makes my art production feel like work and not pure concept.

This photo series was published first in the second Norient book Seismographic Sounds.

Biography

Dylan Culhane is a multi-disciplinary artist, photographer and writer based in Cape Town, and he is known for creating surreal landscapes with multiple exposure photography. More recently, he has been focused on collage as a tactile extension of his visual experiments with parallel realities. Follow him on Instagram, Linkedin, or X.

Published on October 20, 2018

Last updated on April 11, 2024

Desire

Queer

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