Becoming Hole with Emil Martirosian and Rachel Fäth

About

As part of Sentient Earth, exhibiting artists Emil Martirosian and Rachel Fäth perform live, presenting an electronic soundscape as part of Martirosian’s music practice, alongside recorded footage and real-time video projection by Fäth. Commissioned for this evening as a collaborative work in response to the exhibition, the performance resonates with the exhibition’s focus on technologies of extraction and how they bear on the sentient frequencies of the earth’s surface.

Martirosian’s tracks are derived using a similar technique to his paintings, in which scavenged detritus is worked onto the canvas. Here, textural tensions sitting between industrial and natural worlds are pieced together, to create a sonic fabric resting on sub-bass registers. Ahead of the performance, Fäth shot a new video that shows the act of digging a hole into the ground. Unearthing, in this sense, becomes the driving force behind temporal and rhythmic oscillations, acting as both metaphor and material.