The artists approach haptics as intrasensory and affective. The membranes solicit care while remaining strangely autonomous, placing visitors in scenes of tending, grieving, and prayer. One may kneel, sit, lean towards the soft body, hold it, and listen to it, as if it were simultaneously an organ, a patient, and a strange material artefact voicing out.
Together with artists Amos Peled and Denis Połec, develop haptic installation composed of soft, tactile membranes that wrinkle, fold and slowly age. Their organoid surfaces accumulate creases and folds, staging a soft body that sounds from within. Microphones placed inside the membranes capture their internal motility: choreographed peristaltic movements whose gut-like sounds, normally treated as bodily noise, become the installation’s live signal.
Visitors are invited to listen via their chins, using bone-conducting speakers that transmit the live sounds through the bones of the face. Listening is understood as an embodied, multisensory practice: visitors “listen through touch” and experience sound as a physical vibration within their own bodies.
vocal fold tension mismatch began with questions about how different understandings of technology can become entangled and how they shape our perception of what constitutes noise and what constitutes a signal. It proposes an artistic inversion of signal-to-noise in which uncontrollable bodily sounds and metabolic rhythms are transformed into tactile and vocal expressions. What is conventionally understood as interference and filtered out by noise-cancelling technologies becomes the primary signal here. The body functions as a generative sound source whose uncontrollable, ventriloquistic noises are transformed into vocal forms of expression.
You can read more about sikau/pubalova's residency and work in an interview here.
sikau/pubalova have worked in a duo since 2020, exploring the intersection of multisensory arts and experimental opera. Currently, they exhibit international solo shows with vibroacoustics, haptic exploration and smell at Kunsthalle Praha, Science Gallery Bangalore and LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial. Focusing on the intersectional spectres between sciences and arts, they have been commissioned by S+T+ARTS ReSilence, Ars Electronica, LABoral, IMPAKT, transmediale, Schemerlicht, Ensemble Modern and Ligeti Center.
vocal fold tension mismatch by sikau/pubalova in collaboration with Amos Peled and Denis Połec
20th of August till 28th of October
Open Monday to Friday 12:00 - 17:30
The exhibition consists of two installations. The interactive installation can be visited at Mediamatic's Haptic Lab and the other one could be seen at our Border Lab (Greenhouse) or observed from a distance from the streetside.
