The Centre for Screen Cultures, in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Art, is delighted to welcome Dr Sandro Weilenmann to the University of St Andrews. Sandro will deliver a talk entitled ‘In the Labyrinth of the Mouth: The Voice as an Artistic Material and Medium’ at 4pm on Monday 14 April in the Saunders Room at 79 North Street. All are welcome!
The growing popularity of the voice in contemporary art points to methodological challenges for a predominantly visually oriented history of art. Vocal expression transports ideas of immediacy, testimony, and connectivity, which seems to correspond to the rhetoric of more relational and socially engaged approaches in artistic practices. The rapid embrace of vocal strategies, alongside recent voice theories stressing presence and communication, asks us to step back and reflect on its implications and historical echo chambers. This talk traces the emergence of new vocal strategies back to conceptual and feminist artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s. Illuminating the voice’s liminal position between presence and absence, this talk will explore how we can analyse the voice on a formal, material, and narrative level.
Dr Sandro Weilenmann is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maastricht, working on the project Perverse Collections: Building Europe’s Queer and Trans Archives. He is an art historian currently working on artistic participation in queer and trans archives. His fields of research are Western performance art and acoustic artistic practices after 1960. His publication The Present Voice: Vocal experiments in the works of Adrian Piper, VALIE EXPORT, and Yvonne Rainer will appear soon.
In addition to this talk, Sandro will be in conversation with artist and filmmaker Jyoti Mistry at 5pm on Wednesday 16 April. For information on that event, please see here.