Aura Satz, Preemptive Listening, 2018. Image courtesy the artist.
On October 8, the Walker Art Center will host Preemptive Listening, an interdisciplinary event featuring artist Aura Satz and composer and artist Raven Chacon (Diné). The event is the first of several to be staged over the course of two years as part of Satz’s long-form residency with the Walker’s Moving Image department. The evening will kick-off at 7:00 pm and include the presentation of a segment of Satz’s in-development feature film Preemptive Listening. Chacon, who is a musical collaborator on the film, will give a brief live performance, which will be further followed by some Q&A with both artists. The event captures the interdisciplinary nature of Satz’s film project and provides audiences with a behind-the-scenes experience that reflects the creative process inherent to the film’s development. More information about the event, including ticketing information, can be found on the Walker’s website at walkerart.org/visit/cinema/. Satz is London-based artist, whose practice embraces film, sound, performance, and sculpture. In Preemptive Listening, she explores emergency signals and sirens, asking critical questions about how we live, understand, and process these alarms in our current socio-political climate and amid our environmental crises. The film includes footage at sites around the globe where sirens are frequently deployed as well as in locations where sirens are produced. As part of her long-standing engagement with sound art and listening practices, Satz is collaborating with an expansive roster of musicians and sound artists to further examine how we “hear” emergencies and how these sounds affect the ways in which we relate to the catastrophes around us. Chacon explores these concepts in the film by activating an Eagle Bone Whistle, an instrument used by some Indigenous communities. Other sound and musical collaborators on the film include Laurie Spiegel, David Toop, Anton Lukoszevieze, Elaine Mitchener, Mazen Kerbaj, Rhodri Davies, Kode 9, Moor Mother, Sarah Davachi, Evelyn Glennie, FUJI||||||||||TA, and Debit. The event on October 8 invites audience members into this essential aspect of Satz’s filmmaking and provides singular insight into the collaborative engagement between Satz and Chacon. In her artist statement about Preemptive Listening, Satz says, “[The siren] hovers in the split-second before future ruins. The siren calls forth unraveling scars, some near and visible, others remote, imperceptible, buried in the deep future, unimaginable beyond this lifetime…How [do we] recalibrate the siren away from the sound of trauma and towards a sound that allows us to imagine otherwise, towards a future that is not mired in catastrophe?” Throughout her ongoing residency at the Walker, Satz will have opportunities to collaborate and connect with other artists as well as with the Walker’s Moving Image curatorial team. The vision for the residency is to provide artists, like Satz, with the space and platform to continue to explore and experiment as they develop and complete new projects. Equally important to this overarching vision is active and ongoing engagement with the community, through events and presentations that encourage new and dynamic experiences with artists and their work. “Our work with Aura reflects the Walker’s commitment to supporting artists, and to providing the resources and opportunities that will allow for and inspire artistic innovation. This is at the heart of all of the Walker’s work and especially in the different residencies we establish,” said Pablo de Ocamp, Director and Curator, Moving Image. “With the October 8 event, which we are presenting in collaboration with our Performing Arts team, we look forward to engaging our audiences with both Aura and Raven’s practices and to expanding the possibilities of the traditional film screening to embrace live performance. As we emerge from the pandemic, I am particularly attuned to how we can incorporate new components into the film viewing experience that excite audiences and bring them to the cinema.”
About the Artists
Aura Satz is a London-based artist whose work encompasses film, sound, performance, and sculpture. She has performed, exhibited, and screened her work nationally and internationally at Tate Modern, BFI Southbank, New York Film Festival, Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Sydney Biennale, Tokyo’s NTT InterCommunication Center, High Line Art, the Rotterdam Film Festival, MoMA NY, Sharjah Art Foundation, Kadist San Francisco, Onassis Stegi, and others. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, London; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Dallas Contemporary; George Eastman Museum; ARTIUM, Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo; and others. Satz has worked collaboratively with filmmaker Lis Rhodes, and with a wide range of composers, vocalists, and musicians.
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, and Ende Tymes Festival. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile-long land art installation Repellent Fence. Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for his composition Voiceless Mass.