Syncopes at Mimosa House, London

Art Monthly, June 2021

A lacuna, a loss of consciousness, an unstressed beat – for all its different linguistic, medical and sonic definitions – a syncope is a liminal space, a connecting juncture, a tender interval or the end of an exhale before the next breath rushes in. ‘Syncopes’ at Mimosa House explores this notion of pause and interruption, making space for syncopated counternarratives through a conglomeration of multimedia artworks that together create a richly textured exhibition, unpredictable in its rhythms.

In an apt nod to Mimosa House’s rebirth at its new space in Holborn after a year of postponements and uncertainty, the first work we encounter is a video of a foetal ultrasound scan projected onto the wall. In this work, 16 weeks (2018), Mira Calix uses sonification to translate the undulating movements of a foetus in the womb into a sound piece, melodious and classical in its tone. We see the image of the foetus warp and distort with the movement of the ultrasound wand. At times its form is recognisably human, at others it is more akin to the joining and dividing of the wax in a lava lamp. The sound piece, although played by a six-part orchestra and presented as a score next to the work, has no definitive climax or ending. It is a fluid shadowing of this alien movement, tracking the syncope of gestation; that liminal space between the downbeats of conception and birth. 

The practice of transcribing image into sound is also explored in Himali Singh Soin’s work The Particle and the Wave (2015), in which the artist scrolls through a digital version of Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves and highlights the abundant semicolons used by Woolf, marking out the rhythm of the text. The work is a gradual process of erasure, the text slowly fading to leave only the semicolons behind. As Singh Soin picks out a rhythm with her cursor, our eyes follow the pattern, dancing between certain words and blind to others, creating a new text from Woolf’s original. On first viewing, my eyes focused on the phrase ‘now I pretend again to read’; a fair summation of the work’s effect. Using a computer algorithm, chimes can be heard that measure the space between Woolf’s semicolons, the difference in pitch representing the length of space between each usage. This sonic manifestation of Woolf’s punctuation subverts the notion of a syncope as a pause; the reverberation of the chimes overlap rather than separate, marking the syncopation of the text as the lens through which the narrative might be understood. 

Sound is platformed through media other than video in Qian Qian’s interactive installation People should listen to the birds’ flight (2018); Ruth Beraha’s A long long time ago in a galaxy far away (2019); and Lala Rukh’s sound piece Subh-e-Umeed (2008), presented alongside the artist’s series of drawings Mirror Images (2011). In Qian’s work, concerned with the artist’s experience of linguistic untranslatability, braille-coded slabs are presented along the walls of one room, and connected by wires and copper-coloured lines that guide the viewer round the installation. We are invited to touch the work, an act that feels transgressive both in terms of the usual codes of conduct in art spaces and in terms of the nervousness around touch after more than a year of Covid-19. Each touch activates a recorded sound encrypted by the artist into the work, referencing mythology: a recording of the artist’s child’s heartbeat in the womb references Kalaviṅka, an immortal creature in Buddhism; a recording of the sound of writing references Thoth, the Egyptian god who created words and writing; a recording of an unexplained underwater sound recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1977 references the Siren song in Greek mythology and so on. In this work, the viewer becomes an agent in its syncopation, choosing how the sound piece will play out.

The curation of the exhibition is particularly strong. For example, the placement of Rukh’s Mirror Images series opposite her sound piece Subh-e-Umeed (presented in headphones) allows the viewer to contemplate the drawings while listening to the sound, the works informing one another. The stillness of Mirror Images, a series of minimalistic pencil drawings on carbon paper which depict reverberations on water, is contextualised by Rukh’s sound piece that combines field recordings from a day in the artist’s life, beginning with birdsong during her morning walks and ending with impassioned protests on the streets of Lahore.

The standout work in the exhibition is arguably Chooc Ly Tan’s newly commissioned film On the Offbeat (2020), in which the artist, DJ and filmmaker interviews interdisciplinary practitioners about syncopation. The work opens with a discussion of voguing and the rhythms and syncopations within the ballroom scene. Femme vogue dancer Omar Jordan Phillips discusses the importance of the beat in voguing and the pivotal moment where the dancer decides to go with the beat or ‘move through it’; Tan uses the collision of movement and music to tell personal stories about gender identity and bodily transformation. Hannah Katharine Jones also talks about the significance of the beat, alluding to decolonisation as a kind of syncopation that pushes back against the status quo, against the ‘downbeat’ of ‘Eurocentric monoculture’. Linking and separating these various interviews is footage of participants voguing in anonymous outdoor spaces in London, and black screens with neon graphics of sound waves. There are deliberate pauses in the editing of the footage, bringing the viewer back to the notion of syncope, of interrupted rhythm.

After watching Tan’s reflective film, the viewer emerges through thick curtains into a narrow, high-ceilinged space, confronted with the theatricality of Ruth Beraha’s motion-activated sound piece A long long time ago in a galaxy far away in which the artist has adapted the Star Trek soundtrack by playing it in a minor key, transforming it into something both familiar and unfamiliar. The ‘Syncopes’ experience ends with the same disorienting sensation as that of leaving a dark cinema in the middle of the afternoon, blinking at the black, rectangular speaker hung where you might expect a painting, looking for the image within the sound.