Sanctuary, 2009
All your found sculptural assemblages are culled from your immediate local surroundings and re-appropriated into Rube Goldberg like contraptions with each object serving a very specified transmissive function. The sculptural forms then become crucial as they exist to explicate the sounds themselves. Can you expand on the intentionality of the material used, or lack thereof? How do you approach the documentation of these sculptures as images on the internet, without the accompanied support/context of audio?
As images or objects devoid of their operational potential, the works are sculptures like any other static and quiet object of art. I see their formal qualities as a thing in itself - the aesthetic result of a process of engineering music. So the form follows function and therefore the composition or constellation of objects becomes somehow more gestural than designed. Of course as images it is difficult to understand the work as a whole but I hope that the form opens up some ideas around traditional sculpture.
Works like Adhãn, Taka Tak and Evolution of a Revolution, capture a certain political ethos and critique specific Islamic ideological structures . Where potentially, can sound, and music in general (your own and others) exist in such arenas? Where do you see its potential? How do you think it can actively function and what form can it take, besides one of aestheticizing politics?
To be honest I don't believe it can have any immediate function other than an aesthetic one, however, I do think the proliferation of sound and music within an Islamic society can have a transformative social function. This, however, isn't the aim of my practice. For me it's a way of understanding and rationalising the problems around belief systems in general such as religious faith. I make an ideological critique on Islam because I understand it more by growing up with it, but really the critique is about dogmatic views that are prevalent in all types of religious faith....
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Dr Eugenia Fratzeskou