Gallery “101” is pleased to present The Foley Artist’s Folly, a programme of sound performance investigating the uses of comedy for history.
Featuring work by:
October 11th – Marius Juknevičius
October 29th – Arūnas Periokas and Ignas Andriuškevičius
November 11th – Laurynas Rėčkus
with writing from Rachel Kauder-Nalebuff [1]
Organised and curated by Ellen Tracy and Margarita Žigutytė.
For further information http://www.rugsejo.net/ [2]
The Foley Artist’s Folly questions, in line with recent moves towards telling other histories and telling history differently, how the rules and regulations that decide what counts as “proper” history might be suspended. In these performances, sound and the comedic are taken as comrades cast out together from the purview of this sort of history, and each work will propose how this (un)likely pair might come arm in arm to violate the propitiousness of the past, and open up new forms of history to our time. What happens when history is not a “telling” at all, but a sounding? And when this sounding is a joke?
For this month, we permit the sonic to understand history in and through its own specifics, avoiding the harnessing of sound to the demands of “proper” history – sound whipped into shape as language which narrates the past, or convicted to replicate a moment in a storyboard. Sound in these events wriggles free from its association with an absoliute present and presence, and is explored in its capacity to be historical. No longer the serious dwarl of “historical veracity”, sound becomes the inappropriate laugh from the back at history‘s sermon, or an époque read in the rythm of a joke. The Foley Artist‘s Folly plays with what comedy can do for sound, and how collectively they might disfigure, violate, or renovate entirely the sort of linear narrative history we are used to accepting as truth.
Alongside these efforts to unhinge history, the programming of The Foley Artist’s Folly is invested in disturbing the divisions and hierarchies that exist within sound itself. The practices represented by these artists are therefore diverse – ways of working that slip out of the ordinary silhouette of “sound art”. DJs, musicians, beat-makers, and playwrights are presented alongside traditional sound art, and all these crafts are seen uniquely in their capacity to approach and use sound as a critical force.
Please join us for this series of performances to be held at locations around the city of Kaunas throughout the month of October.