Allegro
Andrea Liu & UMMO
01.02.2019
Allegro is the first Radio JUJU event featuring Andrea Liu and UMMO (Aditya Mandayam).
Andrea Liu: The Visitors
The modular synthesiser anthropomorphised into a social body, with each parameter of signal (Frequency-Spectrum-Amplitude) processed differently. Visitor One wants to be integrated into the grand narrative of appreciating art. Visitor Two believes in the mystery and the unknowability and the ineffability of art. Visitor Three believes in the emancipatory potential of extreme experiences. Visitor Four yearns for linear narratives and emotional storytelling. Visitor Five believes art should be an intimate offering amongst friends–it should not have to be funnelled through the language and superstructure of the art world. Each Visitor is a speculation on a hypothetical audience member.
“In any given performance, there is a vast reserve of untapped resources: the audience. I incorporate the hypothetical opinions, desires, and expectations of the audience as the content of my performance. The audience is a crystal, through which various desires, ideologies, assumptions, backgrounds, biases are refracted, projected, frustrated, appeased, challenged, or fulfilled.”
UMMO: Relabi
BRUD’s Benevolent Dictator Aditya Mandayam will introduce the JUJU Modular Human Synthesiser, and its many features. A brief tour of “Periphony” and “Relabi” will follow. He will end with a demonstration of the Ciat-Lonbarde instrument family.
Mandayam’s new solo musical project UMMO combines West-Coast modular synthesis like “Arp, Buchla, Serge, Ciat-Lonbarde, and countless nameless inventions that used bananas” with Indian classical singing, creating layers of ambisonic feedback, resonance, xenharmonic noise, and Carnatic vocals that he calls “modular folk”. In recent years Mandayam’s practice has taken a turn towards the esoteric Hindu traditions of Tantra. Combining avant-garde performance aesthetics with his studies in classical voice, Mandayam’s operatic oeuvre is a gesamtkunstwerk of sculpture, theater, cinema, music, light, text, sound, and image. Drenched in the Tantric trinity of black, white, and red, UMMO is the High Priest of the Temple of the White Cube.
Presentations
by Andrea Liu & UMMO
01.02.2019, 20:30–23:30
Aditya Mandayam † was a writer, musician, and filmmaker and Benevolent Dictator of BRUD. A former resident of the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, Mandayam performed at museums, galleries, festivals, and underground venues worldwide, including CAC, Vilnius, MHKA, Antwerp, kim?, Riga, Art in General, New York, Schloss Solitude, National Museum of Bolivia, National Gallery, Zimbabwe, Baltic Triennial, Kunstverein Munich, FUTURA, Prague, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Empty Brain Resort, amongst others.
Andrea Liu is a visual art/performance critic (and artist). Her visual art and dance criticism deals with the juncture between modernism and postmodernism, dematerialized post-studio art, and the de-historicization of minimalism into a formalist aesthetic. She was awarded 16 artist residencies since 2008, including Atlantic Center for the Arts, Art & Law Program, MFAH Core, Ox-Bow, Millay Colony, Jacob’s Pillow, ZK/U-Berlin, Centrale Fies Liveworks Performance Act Award, and was core participant in Anton Vidokle’s New Museum’s Nightschool. She was curator of Counter-Hegemony: Art in a Social Context at Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius and wrote for Afterimage, ArtMargins, Art US, e-flux (AUP), Social Text, New Museum, Movement Research Journal, Pastelegram, and Postmodern Culture.