Shino Yanai with Ken Ikeda
Memories float for a moment and then fall
Exhibition, 15 November 2024 – 18 January 2025, Wednesday-Saturday, 12-5pm.
A ‘running stitch’, the universal method of making and mending, links the memories that Shino Yanai pulls together in her exploration of identity in this new Beaconsfield commission Memories float for a moment and then fall. Her project explores the capacity of auditory experience to stimulate imaginative reconstructions of historic events and occurrences that determine ‘who you are’[1].
Sometime in the early 1950s, a woman stitches Korean traditional dress to pass the time as she waits at a port for the container ship that will secrete her away to safety. She is the lucky one and survives the voyage to meet her husband in Japan. But there is sacrifice. Her baby is left in Korea to grow up with family members in rural safety, not to be reunited with his mother until many years later – in Japan. Identity is fractured. The son retains Korean identity; his mother’s identity is shrouded; the granddaughter is bequeathed dual identity.
The granddaughter is trained in classical piano from a young age. Later, she chooses to un-learn the discipline, to free sound from its score: to improvise. She also chooses to allow herself freedom of movement by deciding one nationality over another. And in London, her new home, she runs. As she runs, she notices her own breathing; attends to its sound and rhythm. She maps her movement along new routes and makes her progress visible to herself and others, stitching the path as though to bind herself to this present time and place.
Memories float for a moment and then fall is a live audiovisual environment with four sound sources, layering sounds and images from different times and places, in which the artist is always present. In Tokyo, the electroacoustic composer Ken Ikeda improvises remotely in Tokyo, responding to Shino Yanai’s shared video footage of herself, sewing a map of the latest run around the gallery and historic cine footage of Yanai as a child. The composition that Ikeda sends back to London includes field recordings from Tokyo (Yanai’s former home) and these everyday sounds from far away are pitched against local field recordings taken during the artist’s 40-minute central London running circuit – first across Lambeth Bridge, along the river and back over Westminster bridge, and then variable – with her own breathing acting like a metronome. Contemporary recordings from Tokyo and London are juxtaposed with the whirr of a Super 8 video projector – sound and image from the 1980s. Bringing us even closer in time, the soundscape is punctuated with live sounds in the moment. From the Lower gallery, the distorted notes of a prepared piano are amplified to float upwards. Miscellaneous objects are tied into the piano strings to change its familiar tone, and a microphone, hanging over the piano, not only transmits the transformed sounds when the instrument is played, but picks up snatches of live conversation and people moving around the building downstairs. Prior to her residency Yanai wrote:
Beaconsfield is located in the historic Lambeth Ragged Schools, opened in 1851 to educate local children. This venue is celebrated for its rich history, particularly its partial demolition due to railway construction, with the railway now running through the old site, thus bestowing upon it unique auditory and architectural features. The building itself … where many children gathered, with high ceilings coupled with the original wooden floors, renders it a space of exceptional auditory resonance … a captivating location for auditory explorations.
Yanai’s technical investigation of the materiality of sound in this venue simultaneously explores the emotive power of auditory experience to invoke imagination. The motif of the running stich is physically repeated by the artist seated in the gallery, sewing into a classical music score: an interpretative process that represents the un-learning of Yanai’s classical music education, as she experiments with improvisational sound collage. The stitch picks up the embedded memory of impoverished children learning to sew, or to write their own names, in the very building in which the artist is working – the Girls wing of the former Ragged Schools. Such ‘memories’ are evocations of events rooted in hearsay or reminiscence that neither we nor the artist have ever witnessed or experienced and, as such, transcend individual participation. Thus, these fragments are woven together on many levels: they not only express a yearning to know, but bear witness to moving on, and in so doing, generate novel encounters in the moment, continuously raising new consciousness in those present.
Shino Yanai’s Beaconsfield project is an evolving commission, where the artist’s presence is paramount; a collaboration with Ken Ikeda that includes his travelling to London for a live performance. For the artists, their remote interaction emphasises the concept of distance in relation to time, location and the present moment. Ikeda is renowned for his sinewave compositions and brings a unique improvisational approach to his performance with Yanai, who offers voice, video and prepared piano. Together they stretch the medium to look at the power of sound to create fresh or imagined memories – both technical[2] and emotional – re-weaving their sonic fabric into the exhibition environment. And beyond performance in the moment, Memories float for a moment and then fall seeks to explore a longer-term application of the plasticity of sound; the potential of sensorial auditory experience to release fallen, unconscious collective trauma.
Naomi Siderfin, November 2024.
Memories float for a moment and then fall has been made possible through the kind support of the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and Japan Foundation London.
A limited-edition vinyl will be produced by Beaconsfield.
[1] Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, Chicago 2011, p.2.
[2] ibid pp.16-18.