Interview with Aura Satz

21/01/16
Interview: Aura Satz

When she was pregnant with her daughter in 2003, the London-based artist Aura Satz (b1974, Barcelona) used her belly as the antenna for a bespoke theremin – a musical instrument that is played by proximity and hand gestures. She was already a performance artist and sculptor, but this new performance piece awakened Satz’s interest in sound and the correlation – or, more often, mismatch – between sound and vision. Since then, and increasingly through the medium of film, Satz has been exploring acoustics, vibration, sound visualisation and musical gesture. Another strand to her work focuses on gender and women’s (often unseen) contributions to technology. Many of her works combine the two, with months of research and complex backstories, which often remain largely unappreciated by her audience. 

With a retrospective drawing to a close at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, and a new exhibition opening in Dallas, Satz invited Studio International to her studio to take a look at her work on screen and to hear about some of these thrilling and enthralling footnotes.

Read the interview here

Interview with Helen Evans of HeHe

12/08/15

Interview with Helen Evans of HeHe

HeHe: Undercurrent

Bruges Triennial 

20 May - 18 October 2015

Man-made clouds, flying carpets and a broken electricity pylon: French-based artistic duo HeHe, comprising British-born Helen Evans (b1972) and German-born Heiko Hansen (b1970), make work focusing on the environment and urban space. Their large-scale interventions are often controversial, but, despite the serious issues being addressed, there is an element of fun to many of them, and a certain aesthetic beauty to others. HeHe were invited to take part in this year’s Bruges Triennial, for which they produced a new work, Undercurrent (2015), which incorporates sculpture, installation, sound and light. Studio International spoke to Helen Evans about this and other projects.

Read the interview here

Interview with Eloise Hawser at the ICA

03/08/15

Interview with Eloise Hawser

Eloise Hawser: Lives on Wire

ICA Lower Gallery, London
1 July – 6 September 2015

The light in the ICA’s lower gallery changes colour slowly, switching through a deliciously dilute RGB spectrum; the gentle buzzing hum in the background offers a white noise that could lull one to sleep. In the centre of the room stands a curious contraption: a colour-changer taken from the cinema organ once found at the Stockport Regal. Capable of conflating a spectacle of music and light, cinema organs were developed by the British telephone engineer, Robert Hope-Jones, in the early 20th century, to replace the orchestras that had previously accompanied silent movies. Placed behind often quite ornate art deco-style illuminated glass outer shells – somewhat like a jukebox in appearance – these organs could be played remotely via a pneumatic system, albeit sometimes with a slight time lapse between the organist’s command and the resulting sound.

The colour-changing mechanism is a complex contraption, comprising cams, arms and a spring box or variable resistor. Originally, this would have been connected to a set of filament light bulbs but, here at the ICA, it is fed through an analogue to DCX convertor in the ceiling, which makes the LED lights in the gallery change colour.

Accompanying the mechanism are a couple of films – one showing the cinema organ that remains behind the scenes in Burberry’s flagship store on Regent Street – a former cinema – and an installation of BT cables, expanding the theme of wires and incipient obsolescence.

To watch this interview, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/eloise-hawser-interview-video-lives-on-wire-ica-london-cinema-organ

Interview with Keita Miyazaki

18/10/14
Interview with Keita Miyazaki
rosenfeld porcini 

30-year-old artist, Keita Miyazaki, was born in Tokyo and, after studying at the University of the Arts, came to London in 2011 for a three year course at the Royal College.

That same year, Japan was hit by a major tsunami causing widespread mayhem and destruction – and 18,000 fatalities.


In his recent work –  on show here at the rosenfeld porcini gallery in London – Miyazaki responds directly to this national tragedy, seeking to create art out of waste and rubble as monuments to the lost – and to suggest an optimism for the future.

To watch this interview, please go to: http://www.state-media.com/state/index.php?q=videos/miyazaki