Kill Your Timid Notion @ DCA

Article by Rosamund West | 01 Oct 2008

Arika, the team behind Glasgow’s Instal festival, return to Dundee with another helping of Kill Your Timid Notion. For those who have missed the previous instalments, the festival is a weekend-long series of events, film screenings, performances and exhibitions in DCA. The conceptual starting point of this melange of art, music and film lies in the desire to explore and inhabit the faultlines between what you hear and what you see. The organisers enticingly offer the following roundup:

“It features tiny rice paper weather vanes that ripple in the imperceptible movement of air, blindfolded listening experiences and sculptural metal trays, filled with water and vibrated by the sound of 23 thunderstorms. And much more besides...”

The much more besides, from a visual art viewpoint, includes a variety of ingeniously composed one-off events and longer-term installations. Most imagination capturing must surely be the dual live performance and simultaneous synched video projection of former chorister and performance artist Aileen Campbell. At half five on Sunday afternoon she will to be found singing Vivaldi to live accompaniment while bouncing on a trampoline in Gallery 2, as a video feed presents the very same performance at the very same time in Cinema 1. Campbell is interested in the effects of the extremes of environment upon her classically-trained singing, and in this work also seeks to offer a chance for comparative experience of the live show versus the cinema version, presenting both formats simultaneously in a bid to remove any hint of privilege or hierarchy between the relevant media. (Aileen Campbell: Sunday, 17:30, Gallery 2 & Cinema 1)

Also of particular interest over the weekend is the new work by Luke Fowler and Lee Patterson. They’ll be performing a new live audio visual work inspired by La Monte Young’s 1960 instruction score “draw a straight line and follow it.” Their response to this was to find a straight road in Dundee and follow it, documenting the experience in film and sound and picking up souvenirs in the form of natural objects and man-made detritus as they journeyed on their merry way. (Luke Fowler & Lee Patterson: Friday, 21:30, Gallery 2)

As previously stated there is also much, much more besides...Tickets are available on daily or weekend rates, with Arika having taken the remarkably egalitarian policy of offering no discounted prices, instead trying to keep the costs as low as possible for everyone. Their reasoning? No offence, but they know lots of rich students, and lots of their pals are on low incomes but don’t get offered any discount. A fair point, say I.

 

http://www.arika.org.uk