This Friday 20th February sees the Dublin strand of PLASTIK kick off with screenings, talks and performances occurring over three days in various venues across the city. Ahead of her first performance in Ireland, we spoke to artist Hannah Sawtell to gain some insight into her diverse practice.
I’d like to start by highlighting a cinematic process that features heavily in your work, namely ‘the cut’. ‘The cut’ seems to embody both practical and conceptual aspects of your work in the cutting and re-juxtaposition of digital images and sounds, producing ruptures in normative discourse. Another aspect that I’m thinking of is ‘the cut’ as an all too familiar feature of the current economic consensus. Could you elaborate on your use of the cut as a disruptive device?
‘The cut’ produces a porous but frictional edge to an image or sound, and allows different cadences or ideas to be forced together. It also makes a space to reveal the contemporary dialectic within an epoch; it proposes intervention. I have used this process in some of my past work, but the work as a whole attempts to ask questions about the physical and cognitive labour congealed within the contemporary digital image or object; their production, movement and any socio-economic, sonic or visceral properties relating to our geopolitically connected state of things.
With a background as a DJ and running the Detroit music label Planet E, what drew you towards formalising an art practice?
I’m not sure I have formalised an art practice; or at least I attempt to keep things moving. I spent many years involved in music, clubs and records companies. With hindsight, maybe that was art as organising, as ‘the event’. The way I worked during this period, and my experiences, fed into how I make work now—performance, publications, sound, events…
You also run the imprint FOUNDLING COURT, publishing the broadsheet RE PETITIONER which often accompanies your exhibitions. Can you describe how all these various approaches inform or influence each other?
There is, what I see as, a brutalist attitude in all the things I do, even if they become manifest as different media. Working in many ways keeps me learning and not fixed, or bored. It also often means I have to work closely with others—industrial manufacturers, designers… again this all comes from my previous work in Detroit. When you run an underground label you wear many hats. Its all about a ‘praxis of the loci’ or making things happen from below. The broadsheets have been made collectively and I have published some that are more autonomous.
In past exhibitions you have performed with strobe light, digital noise and a sound mirror that you designed and constructed. In addition, you have collaborated with the band Factory Floor in a performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. How do you find live musical performances fit in an art context?
I have made performances for the closing of my exhibitions. I use the exhibition space in this way, to alter its function slightly from the show I have made. At the ICA it was a collaborative performance and for my recent show at Focal Point Gallery it was solo. For these two installations I was using the exhibition installation apparatus as a site to create a dense digital situation, and for the closing I introduced this live element using the Acoustic Sound Mirror structures that are in the show and projecting onto the screen. For Focal Point, the screen was bespoke and I played digital devices behind it. The audience is between the image screen and the sound wall, so they couldn’t see me. The video had a strobing effect, and also employed the cooling tower from the CGI that had been in the show.
Words: Sharon Phelan
Hannah Sawtell’s performance is curated by Sybil Montague for PLASTIK festival. It takes place on Saturday 21 February at Filmbase, Curved Street, Temple Bar. Tickets are €7.
For further information go to www.plastikfestival.com
