Tag: Emeka Ogboh

  • CANINE WISDOM FOR THE BARKING DOG – THE DOG DONE GONE DEAF // Exploring the Sonic Cosmologies of Halim El-Dabh with Artistic Intervention at the Dakar Biennial

    CANINE WISDOM FOR THE BARKING DOG – THE DOG DONE GONE DEAF // Exploring the Sonic Cosmologies of Halim El-Dabh with Artistic Intervention at the Dakar Biennial

    Sonically transformed. Haunting vibrations converging in crescendo. Signifying colourways correlating corresponding frequencies as musical notation. Perforating paper-thin eardrums. Beating through a spectrum of sounds. Tones sculpted, mixed and mastered. The music of modernity finds its tonal traces in histories of the past.

    The recently deceased Halim El-Dabh, was an Egyptian American composer. His six-decade experimental music career positioned him as a pioneer of electronic music. In 2007 he performed his album The Dog Done Gone Deaf  for the Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival in Montreal, Quebec. The musical piece is a fable of the Navajo indigenous American people – the relationship between man and hound. The narrative explores how the dog saves the man’s life, only to be treated with brutality. In response to the violence, the dog covers its ears and goes deaf. However, it eventually forgives the man, in realising that they are both creatures of the earth.

    It was in the middle of the session of The Dog Done Gone Deaf, that El-Dabh invited the audience to close their eyes and breathe together – creating a collective participatory performative moment, one that he hoped would elicit an experience of colour frequencies. A notion that was central to the process and notion of his work.

    CANINE WISDOM FOR THE BARKING DOG/THE DOG DONE GONE DEAF is described as a “spin-off” by the projects curator, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. He goes on to say that it, “seems an appropriate entry point into a venture of reflecting on and paying tribute to one of the greatest composers from the African continent and worldwide, Halim El-Dabh, in the framework of Africa’s most important and most consistent art manifestation, the Dakar biennial.”

    El-Dabh appropriates and invents mythologies in his compositions while disseminating sonic and aural epistemologies. “The exhibition project will also serve as a platform for deliberations on, and experimentations as to what is and where is sound art in contemporary African art, putting a spotlight on transdisciplinary artistic practices between the visual, performative, installative and sonic mediums.”

    Bonaventure highlights the importance of narrating and actively claiming one’s own histories within a framework of Pan-Africanist ideology. “Our intention is also to re-establish a genealogy of modern arts and sound arts in Africa and beyond, and contemporary sound artists, painters, video and installation artists are hereby invited to relate, extrapolate from, get inspired by El-Dabh’s practice – his compositions, installations, theories and research.”

    Younes Baba Ali, Leo Asemota, Satch Hoyt, Tegene Kunbi, Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri, Ibrahim Mahama, Nyakallo Maleke, Elsa M’bala, Yara Mekawei, Emeka Ogboh, Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom & Ima-Abasi Okon, Lorenzo Sandoval and Sunette Viljoen are artists who span the continent. CANINE WISDOM FOR THE BARKING DOG/THE DOG DONE GONE DEAF invited them to engage with El-Dabh’s seminal text, using it as a point of departure to explore sonic modalities and create an artistic response of their own.

    “For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.”

    • Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, 1977.
  • Sound as a map and an archive

    Sound. The vibrations that travel through the air (or another medium) that can be heard when in contact with a person’s eardrum. Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh takes this definition of sound outside of physics and places it within history and urban anthropology. In his artist bio Emeka Ogboh explains that he creates soundscapes to explore how private, public and collective memories and histories are translated, transformed and encoded into sound. Through different projects sound is treated as a map and an archive.

    “If you have ever been to Lagos you will understand why sound is my preferred medium. One of the first impressions of the city is the intensity of its soundscapes,” Ogboh states in an interview with Africa Is A Country.

    Ogboh’s work Lagos Soundscapes directly addresses his fascination with the history and aural infrastructure of cities, particularly in Lagos. For this project a video camera and recording device captured the audio that maps out Lagos. From the sounds of cars moving to yelling bus conductors and vendors selling items to those occupying the streets, audiences can listen to a layered audio cartography that was mapped out by sonic vibrations. The beauty of this comes from the fluidity of this cartography. Unlike physical, visual maps, these sounds are present the way in which the inhabitants of the city have made sound coordinates. This kind of auditory mapping fits in with the dynamic nature of cities and the urban cultural habits of those who make the city their home.

    Ogboh’s more recent sound installation Logan Squared: Ode to Philly, featuring poet Ursula Rucker, engages with sound and collective memories. Part of the citywide Monument Lab exhibition in Philadelphia, here we see Ogboh play on the idea of monuments as physical features. He presents a sound monument that features Rucker’s poetry, songs by the Chestnut Street Singers as well as Philadelphians whose ideas and memories were documented during Monument Lab’s discovery phase [Monument Lab is a public art and history project produced with Mural Arts Philadelphia]. In this work we see how sound is used as an archive in the same way that a statue or mural would be used.

    Check out some of Ogboh’s older work below to get a feel for his soundscapes.