sound

Last November the first public event to take place in the newly refurbished Scottish National Portrait Gallery was a performance devised by artist Steven Anderson called Your Leaning Neck: Song as Portrait. In response to portraits in the room celebrating Scotland’s contribution to the Enlightenment, Anderson invited seven artists from both oral tradition and contemporary singing backgrounds to perform. With no painted portraits of oral tradition singers in the national collection the event sought to challenge institutional representations of national identity by giving voice to non-institutional values.

A silent video installation of last November’s hugely successful event, consisting of a real time full-length documentation from two perspectives, will be on show at Peacock Visual Arts. In being videoed the performers and audience become as fixed to the image document as the portraits on the walls of the Portrait Gallery.

There is also the exciting opportunity to see a re-contextualisation of the live performance, featuring performances by Ruth Barker, Elizabeth Stewart, Sheila Stewart, Hanna Tuulikki (with Nerea Bello and Lucy Duncombe) and Arthur Watson in the visually and acoustically stunning location of the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St Andrew. The event starts at Peacock Visual Arts.