Grounded Outer Space People
music ensemble / artist residency
Dates:
1014, New York: 01.06 – 30.06 2023
Galerie Wedding, Berlin: 13.10 – 18.11.2022
HKW, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin: 20.11.2022 – 31.12.2022
Galerie Wedding: 14.10.2022 – 16.11.2022
Pop-Kultur Festival Berlin: 01.05.2021 – 31.08.2021
Grounded Outer Space People is a nomadic music ensemble and artist residency that traces the relationship between transmigration and music.
The project unfolds through a migratory process between sites and changing constellations of artists and contexts, approaching transmigration as a situated sonic practice shaped by bodies, territories, and histories. Playfully embracing the notion of reincarnation, understood as one lifetime at a time, the project considers how lives, sounds, and narratives move across bodies, places, and generations. Working within the tension between death as universal and dying as always specific, the residency listens for possibilities of living and sounding otherwise. It therefore gathers artists, musicians, and cultural practitioners into a nomadic band, inviting them to take part by attuning with contexts they carry, shaped by migration, displacement, and diasporic histories.
One iteration of the nomadic residency takes the form of a performative exhibition at Galerie Wedding, Berlin. Operating as a temporary studio over the course of one month, the group of artists in residence inhabits the exhibition space and expands it through ensemble rehearsals, concerts, radio broadcasts, presentations, performances, listening sessions, as well as sound and visual works and workshops.
Amid a sense that most political frameworks fall short, the project draws from Ukrainian cosmism, approaching its imaginative and planetary thinking through sound and collective listening. Taking inspiration from the ‘Chicago Boys: While we were singing, they were dreaming’ project by Hiwa K, figures such as Fedir TetyANYCH, and musical lineages including Don and Moki Cherry’s Organic Music Society, this constellation offers an entry point to explore transmigration as a performative, artistic and collective practice. By inviting artists and musicians from different migratory backgrounds to work together within an ephemeral music ensemble, Grounded Outer Space People proposes a space in which new poetics of displacement can emerge.
With the opening of the first iteration of the “Transmigration Library,” audiences are invited to engage with an evolving collection of books curated through Kats’ transdisciplinary practice of sonic antifascism, conceived as a meeting space for listening, research, and gathering.
Artists in residency: Aiko Okamoto, Anja Jadryschnikova, Bastian Schmiedecke, Ezgi Ulubayrak, Hani Mojtahedy, Helleroid, Jared Meier-Klodt, Kelly Krugman, Khaled Kurbeh, Liam Wustrack, Matt Evans, Nima Séne, Oleksandra Monda, Olivia Lucy Phillip, Pelsho, Takuya Nakamura, Yulia Vlaskina, Ziggy Zeitgeist.
Galerie Wedding curation Solvej Helweg OvesenWithin the framework of Existing Otherwise | Anders Existieren 2021–22 at Galerie Wedding
Further Links:
E-Flux
Residency Events:
25.10.2022, 7 to 9 pm Interlude Grounded Outer Space People
26.10.2022 Radio Transmission: Notiz für die Welt danachEvent with Aiko Okamoto.
10.11.2022, 6 pm Same Page Different Corner with Anton Kats. Ukrainian musicians meet up and »Vostok 7« listening session
18.11.2022, 5 pm Exhibition tour with Solvej Helweg Ovesen and Anton Kats
18.11.2022, 7 to 9 pm Volta. Final performance and concert Grounded Outer Space People.
Galerie Wedding Credits:
Gallery Management: Dr. Ute Müller-Tischler
Curatorial Assistance program coordination: Malte Pieper, Kathrin Pohlmann
Curatorial Assistance press and communication: Maya Smoszna
Internship: Manuel Bendig
Set Up Support: Igor Ivanishyn
GOSP Sound System 3D Mapping: Byron Kalomamas
GOSP Sound System Carpenter: Jörg Fischer
Mittlungsradio Sound System Support: Anna-Maria Lesevic
Photography: Juan Saez
Camera: Hyejeong Yun, Takashi Kunimoto, Pascal Kanitz
With the kind support of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Exhibition Remuneration Fund and Exhibition Fund for Municipal Galleries and Musicboard Berlin.
