The Voice of a City is also a growing archive of material (texts, images, sounds...). This material has given birth to several exhibitions. However, ultimately the exhibition part of the project consists of two sections. One that is closely linked to the performance and is thus often presented in conjunction with it and an exhibition that is very much a work in and by itself.
Each public event is always constructed to fit a particular context and so the content of the exhibitions may vary from one place to another. Some elements are also conceived in a way that they are always in process, meaning that new material is added along the way, slightly shifting the content as time goes by.
For the sake of clarity let’s here call the two parts exhibition A and exhibition B.
The photographs above and on the right are from exhibition A. Hereunder stills from a film present in exhibition A.
The film shows excerpts of talks conducted during the process in 2017-18.
Exhibition A is of a documentary nature and traces the artistic process, with material such as excerpts of talks on film and photography.
This part also contains a reading corner where visitors can dive into the book The Voice of a City.
In exhibition B fiction plays a bigger role than in any of the other works made of the project.
The core of exhibition B are neon coloured posters with texts that talk about a fictional city that is based on the cities the artists have visited. These posters are accompanied by two films, a model city made from found materials and toy cars and a map.
The material in the exhibition takes the viewer on a journey that drifts from public to voyeuristic and intimate transmitting a feeling of decline and absurdity. It offers the visitor, in some sense, the possibility to look back at the future.
Going from a black and white world to an exaggeratedly coloured one the work plays with time, confusing what is past and what is yet to come, what is memory and what is prediction, what is fact and what is fiction.
exhibition view from Beyond the Black Box festival, Amsterdam (NL), February 2019 (exhibition B)
Exhibition A and B conceived and realized by
Nada Gambier and Mark Etchells
Produced by Nada & Co. (Brussels, BE)
Co-produced by Next International Festival / Kunstencentrum BUDA (FR/ BE), C-Takt, Neerpelt (BE)
Supported by (in Belgium) WpZimmer, Antwerp/ La Bellone, Brussels/ SAS Parenthèse, Brussels/ Kunstenwerkplaats Pianofabriek Brussel (abroad) Gallery Nectar, Tbilisi (GE)/ Saari Artist’s residencies and Kone Foundation (FI)/ Mind the Fact festival, Athens (GR)/ Tanzhaus Zurich (CH)/ Le Vivat, Armentières (FR)/ Le Phénix, Valenciennes (FR)
Special thanks to Thomas Kasebacher for his input during the research phase of the process, creating and collecting source material and to Ant Hampton for his feedback in the early stages of creation.
The Voice of a City received a Writing Aid in 2018 by the IN SITU platform, in the frame of the ACT project, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union
The project also received project subsidies 2017-19 from the Flemish Ministry of Culture
Above and hereunder exhibition views from Buda Kunstencentrum (BE), April 2019 (exhibition B)
Exhibitions have been presented in amongst others:
B-Europe Festival, Dresden, Germany 2018
Beyond the Black Box festival, Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2019
Kende Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, 2019
C-Takt festival, Genk, Belgium, 2019
Next Arts festival, Buda Kunstencentrum, Kortrijk, Belgium 2019