»Mutant Farmyard Activities« – Video and Sonic Art Exhibition by fourth Radio Art Residency fellow Warrick Swinney

With the title of the exhibition, the artist takes up a line from the poem/song »Supernatural Disaster« by the south African poet Lesego Rampolokeng (the piece can be listened to on »Bandcamp« at: https://kalaharisurfer.bandcamp.com/track/supernatural-disaster). Swinney has had a long collaboration with Rampolokeng since the late 1980s. In it, the poet refers metaphorically to the novel »The Animal Farm«, which is considered a parable of the history of the Soviet Union. The February Revolution, which started from the people, finally ended in Stalin's dictatorial rule. In his poem/song, Rampolokeng paints a bleak picture of the decaying farm: »Word disintegrates to zero sound«, Rampolokeng says. There is no dialogue, and the poet‘s voice is silenced.

This motif of »disintegration« is the key to much of the exhibition. The scrambling and jamming of signals is the source of the video material, where special encryptions are used to deny viewers access and thus disintegrating the purpose of the video. A few of the videos Swinney has created accentuate this feature and propose an accidental or random beauty - an allusion to glitch art, in which digital or analogue errors are used for aesthetic purposes, either by corrupting data or physically manipulating electronic devices. The loss of control becomes a calculated part of the artwork.

Swinney draws a connection to South African history, in which the figure of the farmer experiences a dark history of exploitation and suffering. He references literary sources, such as Octavia E. Butler's dystopian novel »The Parable of the Sower«, in which the author evokes the slow disintegration of the USA's community of states. The motif of disintegration – of ruling structures and societies – in the former Soviet Union as well as in South Africa and the USA inspired Swinney's current work.

»But today, tonight, we sit, powerless, around candle light and battery banks, and uncanny silence descends like a cool mist," Swinney describes. "We have a different fear. The fear of the fearless, particularly of those who exist outside of the civil order .... A fear of the disintegration of the entire social fabric. In truth, we fear our own people, their inaction rather than their actions. We fear their incompetence and thoughtlessness. We fear their greed and arrogance and their callous disregard for the poor and marginalised. The loops of stale ideas embedded in doctrine circle around eternally. Repetition is key to expressing this. Sonically expressed through the rhythm of the tape loop, the sample.«

About the Radio Art Residency
The Radio Art Residency is an international fellowship programme for artistic practice in radio. The residency is a joint project of the Goethe-Institut and the Professorship »Experimental Radio« at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in cooperation with the Hochschule für Musik FRANZ LISZT, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, the EIGENHEIM Weimar/Berlin and the ACC Galerie Weimar. The aim of the scholarship is to support independent and open-ended artistic work and to help realise new artistic works. From the use of radio as an exhibition space for artistic works to the use of radio as a medium of real time, the residency offers diverse possibilities for shaping artistic practice.

»Mutant Farmyard Activities« - Video/Sonic Art.
Exhibition opening with guided tour by the artist:
Saturday, December 3, 2022, 7 p.m.

Performance:
Friday, 9 December 2022, 7 p.m.

Exhibition Duration:
4 to 15 December 2022

Exhibition Location:
Galerie EIGENHEIM Weimar
Asbachstraße 1
99423 Weimar
www.galerie-eigenheim.de

For further information on the Radio Art Residency, please visit the project's website at
https://www.uni-weimar.de/projekte/radioartresidencyweimar/  

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Eleftherios Krysalis, project coordinator of the artist residency, by e-mail at eleftherios.krysalis[at]uni-weimar.de.