December 2010
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Silence
This issue is edited by Hakan Topal with contributions by Defne Ayas, Anne Barlow, Regine Basha, Dan Cameron, Aslihan Demirtas, Cevdet Erek, Tony Chakar and Micah Silver.
Together, these authors discuss the possibilities and limitations of the condition of silence by looking at examples in art, music and across socio-political contexts. Several authors take on silence within a global context, and address the concatenation of sound, history and nation.
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On Silence: Introduction
by Hakan Topal
Can silence solely be considered in terms of the absence of sound, similar to darkness, which is understood in terms of the absence of light? Contrary to our understanding of total darkness, silence appears to be a subjective generalization. It can be achieved through the subtraction of prevailing audio frequencies rather than the elimination of all sound proper.
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Silence is Sexy
Micah Silver
Micah Silver weaves through the history of music and gives us a well informed chronicle of silence in sound-based practices. He also questions the political dimension of silence and the act of silencing in popular music, which pacifies the audience in order to convey their message
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Tarata tinn
Cevdet Erek
Tinnitus (tinnio for ringing, an onomatopoeia in Latin) is an internal sound which someone hears in the absence of an external sound. You can hear it after a very loud concert or after surviving a car bomb explosion. Waking up to a new day, a tinnn in your ears may remind you of what happened the night before, analogous to an afterimage; the yellowish halo that you perceive just after looking directly at the sun. A stimulus exceeding a certain threshold leaves its trace for a certain amount of time, then fades out.
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Putting a Puzzle Together: An interview with Defne Ayas on her curatorial research trip to Armenia
Defne Ayas
Defne Ayas discusses her recent curatorial trip and outlines the challenges and difficulties of engaging with highly sensitized issues characterized by the multi-layered histories within the former Ottoman landscape and highly nationalized contexts. Regional issues, relationship between cultures and regional art production become the central focus of her undertaking.
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Silence of the Land
Aslihan Demirtas
Aslihan Demirtas discusses a historical site, the ancient Armenian city Ani, which is now located within the national boundaries of Turkish Republic at the Armenian [previously Soviet] border. According to Demirtas, Ani represents a symbolically charged space because of the relationship between Armenia and Turkey. She argues that one has to look beyond national boundaries in order to grasp its importance and relationship in terms of the continuity of land as a free uninterrupted domain.
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Silence is the universal refuge
Dan Cameron
Dan Cameron points our attention to various works which activates our auditory senses by visually addressing out our collective memories. Cameron gives a philosophical account about sound-scape that is intrinsic to our bodies and is related listening therefore thinking.
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Silent Continent
Anne Barlow
Of course Antarctica is not completely silent, or monochrome, but it was especially within those moments of silence that the environment felt closest to a neutral zone, unfettered by sound as an indicator of cultural context. There was no music, language, sounds of a city, or any visual references to borders; one could imagine that this was a truly apolitical space. This utopian image of Antarctica is maintained in the popular psyche as the seventh continent at the end of the world, owned by no-one. The reality of both the race to the pole1, and the more recent Antarctic Treaty2 is more complex, and when encountering the research stations of countries including the Ukraine, United Kingdom and Argentina, the presence of "nationality" and related notions of territory become more transparent.
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An Endless Quick Nightmare
Tony Chakar
Tony Chakar utilizes various images and text from religious and literature sources and combines them to present a personal narrative. His visual manifestation is influenced by the conditions in which he is experiencing in Beirut, his home city.
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(Re)Tuning Baghdad
Regine Basha
Tuning Baghdad brings together a growing archive of live video performances, audio clips and historical information on Iraqi Jewish musicians and the music scene that was displaced from Baghdad in the late 1940s. As an alternative to making a linear documentary film, the website features four video chapters along with relevant audio and textual links to the complex histories that interweave this community with the history of the region and to the Iraqi Maqam. The aim is to continue to build this virtual home for a music scene divided by political borders.
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