Programmes

Co-Motion Single Field Instrument

Performance

Nour Mobarak

Curated by Aki Onda

Presented by the Western Front

Nov 17, 2023, 7:30 PM, Nov 18, 2023, 3 PM

Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Nour Mobarak, Co-Motion Single Field Instrument, The Renaissance Society, 2022. Image courtesy of The Renaissance Society and Lampo. Photo credit: Ryan Edmund Thiel.

Libby Leshgold is pleased to host Nour Mobarak’s performance Co-Motion Single Field Instrument, presented by the Western Front.

Nour Mobarak is an artist working in performance, sound installation, and sculpture to create inter-sensory systems that reframe how we perceive the body and voice in space. In Co-Motion Single Field Instrument, Mobarak turns the gallery into a room-sized instrument by using a real-time tracking system designed and conceptualized by the artist, and digitally programmed by Alex Iglizian, to trigger sounds, samples, and audio and lighting effects, as she moves across colour-coded marks on the floor.

Across the sixty-minute duration of her two performances, Mobarak will improvise and interact with different modes of sound synthesis, to explore the shifting reactions to her location and how the system becomes an uncanny collaborator—with the sounds triggered affecting Mobarak’s movement and live vocalizations, which in turn affects the sound.

Alongside Mobarak’s own vocalizations, the work also layers in many other voices drawn from a large sound bank of samples that she’s compiled. These include recordings of some of the most phonemically complex languages, such as Taa, Abkhaz, San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino, and Silbo Gomero—each one reflecting a much wider sonic palette than languages like English.

Curated by Aki Onda.

Presented by Western Front in partnership with Libby Leshgold Gallery. Co-Motion Single Field Instrument was originally commissioned by Lampo and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where the project was organized by Andrew Fenchel and Karsten Lund.

Biographies

Nour Mobarak is a Lebanese-American artist based in Los Angeles, United States and Athens, Greece. Working across sound, performance, video, sculpture, and writing, her practice reflects a longstanding interest in mechanized voice, memory, violence and desire, and the hybridized body under geopolitical conditions.