The Noon Sirens

Anaïs Duplan, screenshot from The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch, 2018

The Noon Sirens invites Anaïs Duplan, Johanna Hedva and Lara Mimosa Montes to occupy Amant’s digital spaces ahead of and during SIREN (some poetics).

If SIREN (some poetics) recognizes the siren as both a warning of danger and the danger itself, The Noon Sirens acts as a precursor to this fact. While much has been said of the fluidity of digital space, it remains a deeply contested water. The Noon Sirens anticipates the trouble.

The artists and writers are invited to challenge the dominance of ‘universal’ languages, resist data’s absolutization of knowledge, where numbers speak for themselves and regress the violence of accelerated digital communication. Just as there is no neutral voice, there is no neutral space, and these artists consider the territories they occupy and what a de-colonization of the digital might be.

Johanna Hedva, still from GLUT: a superabundance of nothing, 2021

As a dispersed, yet connected set of events, The Noon Sirens ensure the efficacy of the siren. Whilst digital territories can be liberatory spaces for self-expression and participation, enabling us to speak up and speak out to the world online, in doing so there, our dissenting voices too frequently reify the very problems we intend to critique. These kinds of complicities do not warrant refusal or withdrawal but radical reorganization. The Noon Sirens looks to establish discrepant relations to these spaces and asks how language might be able to resist capture, re-balance the distribution of rights, and trouble our relations to power.

This is not an attempt to rise above complicity but forge a radical one by recognizing the disposition of the terrain and occupying it more fugitively than before. Testing, waiting, living through, and contending with the siren.

Hana Noorali & Lynton Talbot

Lara Mimosa Montes, The Cinderella Complex-XXX, 2014

Johanna Hedva
Scream Demo

In the final installment of The Noon Sirens, Johanna Hedva gives over their Scream Demo (2021), a vocal piece that casts the body and its voice as an expression of the pleasure of refusal. Recorded in Hedva’s apartment during lockdown, the five-minute track is all voice, with minimal effects of reverb and delay. Layered into a sonic composition that moves through different registers, Scream Demo demonstrates Hedva’s range, technique, and stamina, as they swing between the antipodal styles of opera and P’ansori, pushing into the possibility of vocal cord damage.

In making this edge legible, and sometimes taking the body beyond it with all the attendant possibility of failure, Hedva invokes an inversion of normative Western values around what a voice should, and should not, sound like—and, ultimately, what it can be used for. Scream Demo is from a larger body of all-vocal work-in-progress that Hedva is currently making.

listen to Scream Demo

Lara Mimosa Montes
Whale Tongue

Commissioned specifically for The Noon Sirens project, Whale Tongue, is a work of ecstatic prose that traces the movements between being and non-being, presence, myth, soliloquy and uncertainty. Lara Mimosa Montes’ writing holds the reader in a liminal zone, feeling for borders and boundaries and exceeding their limits as only language can do.

SIREN (some poetics) observes that in the original Greek of the Odyssey, only a voice was referred to when the sirens sang to Odysseus and his crew. Never a body. The voice, disembodied, was alone a technology of cognition and knowledge. It was in the later tellings of this story that a body was constructed. Each body a projection, emanating from a sympathetic origin to lend legibility to the tale. It is still a constitutive act to build a body around speech. Each body still a projection of the power that shapes it.

The Noon Sirens considers how speech and language arrive online. Our avatars are a construction and a performance determined by the digital contexts that hold us and they are inevitably shaped in the image of the power that plays out in these territories. What would it mean to deny this enforced body? How to resist such inscription? In Lara Mimosa Montes’s text, that resides in the templated architecture of Amant’s website, we read a “transversal speech; sound without origin.” Transversal, from geometry, meaning a line that obliquely intersects - a line that breaks a regular system of lines. Whale Tongue is an experiment in obsession, excess, and arrhythmic self-annihilation.

Dismissive of the body this language is given, Whale Tongue gives shape to the space between bodies. The voice itself as cognition, as something physical, and with shape. Afterall, “This tongue is a sensory organ that sweats something viscous and thixotropic”.

This work was made possible in part with the support of Headlands Center for the Arts.

read Whale Tongue

Anaïs Duplan
Out of Dark Noise

Out of Dark Noise is an online lecture performance on Black experimental documentary. Anaïs Duplan live narrates excavated and abstracted rap music videos, sometimes detached from their original audio and left isolated as visual media, as an ad hoc spoken commentary.

This interaction with archival videos draws on the historic and cultural specificity of the material but also integrates live commentary from the audience. This form of reading and being read attempts to make space for collectively reading the material for its affect and emotion, following a mode practiced by Édouard Glissant, Fred Moten, and Simone Wright.

By removing the original sound from the videos, Out of Dark Noise prompts a type of live poethics. Used by artists and writers such as Rhea Dillon and Joan Retallack, poethics speaks to an aesthetic of complexity and calls for taking responsibility for chance. The addition of an ‘h’ introduces an ethical dimension and thickens ‘poetics’, offering the possibility that art is a form of living in the world.

This performance aims to produce a site of relationality, feeling, and collective resonance. As a poethics it considers responsibility to and for the other as opposed to the traditionally forceful ethics of universal rules of community. Out of Dark Noise’s aftermath, as a silent visual collage, leaves space for continual reading and collective reflection over the duration of SIREN (some poetics).

This work was part of a live lecture performance by Anaïs Duplan that took place on Amant’s homepage on June 6, 2022.

Anaïs Duplan, Out of Dark Noise, 2022, 47’ 46’'

Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot work collaboratively with artists to produce text, exhibitions, and live events. Together they have started non-profit galleries in both London and Berlin and have curated exhibitions in public institutions, project spaces, and galleries across London and internationally including The boys the girls and the political at Lisson gallery in 2015. In 2019 they were selected to realize an exhibition, The Season of Cartesian Weeping, at the Roberts Institute of Art as part of their annual curator’s series.  In 2020 Hana Noorali, along with Tai Shani and curator Anne Duffau, started TRANSMISSIONS, an online platform that shares artists’ work in a classic DIY tv format. TRANSMISSIONS  has worked with Legacy Russell, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, CAConrad and others.  In 2019 Lynton Talbot started parrhesiades, a multi-platform project working with artists for whom language is an essential part of their work. parrhesiades has worked with Sung Tieu, Johanna Hedva, Cally Spooner, Anaïs Duplan Sophia Al Maria, P. Staff, and others.   In 2021 Hana and Lynton co-edited Intertitles: An Anthology at the Intersection of Language and Visual Art, published by prototype press. Their writing has been published by Phaidon, Harun Farocki Institute, The Journal of Visual Cultures, Moving Image Review Journal, Art Monthly, Art Review and in exhibition catalogues and other publications.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean-American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer.They are the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (Sming Sming/Wolfman Books 2020) and On Hell (Sator Press/Two Dollar Radio 2018). Their work has been shown in Berlin at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Klosterruine, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; Performance Space New York; Gyeongnam Art Museum in South Korea; the LA Architecture and Design Museum; and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Johanna’s writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Lithub, Die Zeit, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their next book, a novel called Your Love Is Not Good, will be published by And Other Stories Press in 2023.Their album The Sun and the Moon was released in March 2019; their LP, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, was released January 1, 2021 on crystalline morphologies and Sming Sming.

Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, E-flux, The Poetry Project, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of artist residencies from Marble House Project, Storm King: Shandaken, and Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2018, she was awarded a McKnight Fellowship in Poetry. Most recently, she is coeditor of the artist monograph Darrel Ellis (Visual AIDS, 2021). Lara teaches at the University of Minnesota. To read more about her work visit: laramimosa.info

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017).He is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, and has taught poetry at The New School, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, amongst others. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. He is the recipient of the 2021 QUEER|ART|PRIZE for Recent Work, and a 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction.In 2016, Duplan founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One.