Anna Orlikowska
Can you hear me?
The installation by Anna Orlikowska transforms the white cube of Project Room into a resonance chamber filled with overlapping scenarios of the physical act of hearing – with your ears, head and entire body, which finally dematerializes as something imaginary, an experience of the listener. The voice acts as a temporary link between remote spaces and moments in time. Sounds created in the artist's studio in Chicago are played and re-processed in the gallery space in Warsaw through acts of intense hearing and speaking with the use of physical objects. Voice gets coloured with matter and is shaped by objects, penetrates spaces and architecture, returns, fades away, is attenuated or amplified. It becomes key to move and act according to the hints-instructions prepared by the Artist; to experience a physical interaction with sounds. The listener becomes another object hit by sound waves, another individual membrane, a living, mobile container for the resonance.
Anna Orlikowska describes her installation as follows: ‘The work combines two points in time and space: the place where the sounds were recorded and the place where they are played. Each place has its own, distinct acoustic properties. The element that both spaces have in common is human voice heard through sound boxes or resonance chambers. The first resonating space consists of the lungs and body of the person who emits the voice. Before it can be heard in a gallery room by the spectators/listeners, it reverberated in the space around the speaker. Before sounding in the space around the speaker, it had been filtered by the resonance chambers of things placed on its way (vases, chests, closet interiors, jugs, objects placed inside other objects, etc.). When the recording is played in the gallery room for spectators, it reverberates through various objects that are placed there. As a result, a Chinese box structure is created, made of a series of resonating spaces and objects, stretched through spacetime.’
