What could it mean to send your voice out into space? To communicate beyond your own sphere of experience?
Sonic Signals is a proposal for a new form of open ended infrastructure; conflating and connecting a primary school, an after school radio club, and an artist-led multiverse.
Responding to the particularities of working with Eastside Projects and Chandos Primary School as an Incidental Artist, Abbas Zahedi has developed a site-sensitive concept that proposes a new kind of relationship between the two organisations, opening a portal between them through which a potentially infinite loop of audio can be transmitted. Messages made by children will move from the school into the gallery, where they will be played openly for everyone to hear.
What the children choose to send is completely up to them.
Looping, dynamic, intuitive and non-linear, this collaged structure has emerged over time in dialogue with a group of twelve, nine and ten year olds who have been meeting weekly as an after-school Radio Club. Across this time Radio Club have been getting used to the sound of their own voices, learning to record sound, use mixing software and build sound loops. Visiting creatives have shown them how to use audio description to create vivid pictures in peoples’ minds, how to interview people and record sound in their environment, and how to collectively design a visual identity using handmade stamps and collage. They have also been developing their own ideas and making recordings to send through to Eastside Projects.
In May and June artists Exodus Crooks (formerly known as De’Anne), melissandre varin, Sarah Farmer, Samiir Saunders, Indira Lakshmi and Ayan Aden will work with every class in the school, using their own practices and a series of open prompts developed by Abbas as a starting point for workshops which will generate new recordings. Designed to give children the agency to think creatively about their environment and share thoughts, ideas and feelings, the prompts and tools Abbas is developing through this phase will become a set of cards and workshop formats for other children, staff, schools and artists to use to develop recordings that can be added to the Sonic Signals loop in the future.
The broadcast will go live in the gallery on Digbeth First Friday 2 June, and evolve across the next six weeks and beyond as a new long term artwork for Eastside Projects.
Abbas is working with Eastside Projects and Chandos Primary School as an Incidental Artist.
Sonic Signals has been made possible by a range of guest contributors, artists, designers, makers and members of the Chandos School staff team including:
Elaine Joseph, Sofia Niazi, Sam Coley, Peter Donnelly, Laura Grinvalde, Lenny Singh-Raud, Lezli Howarth, Yuri Nishikawa, Alex Cockell, Sarah King, Ayan Aden, Exodus Crooks, melissandre varin, Sarah Farmer, Samiir Saunders, Indira Lakshmi, Middleton Hall Upholstery.
Generously supported by Ecclestone & Hart
Abbas Zahedi (b. 1984, London, UK), studied medicine at University College London, before completing his MA in Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins in 2019. He blends contemporary philosophy, poetics, and social dynamics with performative and new-media modes. With an emphasis on how personal and collective histories interweave, Abbas makes connections whenever possible with people involved in the particular situations upon which he focuses. He lives and works in London.
Selected exhibitions, interventions, projects and performances include: Holding a Heart in Artifice, Nottingham Contemporary, (2023); Loading Loading, CAPC, Bordeaux, (2022-2023); Metatopia 10013, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2022); Waiting With {Sonic Support}, Frieze Artist Award, London, 2022; The London Open (2022), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Postwar Modern, Barbican, London (2022); Testament, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022); Temporary Compositions, Gallery 31 Somerset House, London (2021); Ouranophobia SW3, Chelsea Sorting Office (2020); How To Make A How From A Why?, Fire Station, South London Gallery, London (2020); Diaspora Pavilion, (ICF), Palazzo Pisani a Santa Marina, Venice (2017).
Abbas has been the recipient of numerous awards including: the Frieze Artist Award (2022); the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists (2021); the Serpentine Galleries’ Support Structures for Support Structures (2021); Artangel, Thinking Time (2020); Jerwood Arts Bursary (2019); Aziz Foundation Academic Scholarship (2018); and Khadijah Saye Memorial Fund Scholarship (2017). He is an associate lecturer at the Royal College of Art (London), as well as teaching at universities across the UK and abroad.
Find out more at abbzah.com
Chandos is a giant primary school located in Highgate. We have many teachers, dinner ladies and teacher assistants. Chandos School is part of the Elliott Foundation Academy Trust. There are eight year groups including reception and nursery.
Chandos School is on Vaughton St in Highgate. It is one street away from my house, near the Central Mosque, near St Albans Church, in Birmingham, West Midlands, Europe, Earth. Our postcode is B12 0YN.
Not all people are the same, there are different people and friends. Chandos is international and multicultural with different races and languages. We are kind. We care about other people. It is friendly and lovely and is a good environment.
Excerpts from an introduction for artists written in April 2022 by the Chandos Champions and the Arts Ambassadors – Kassiya, Kesi, Halima, Sakina, Yahya, Mayah, Taijuan, Lucas, Anshi, Rejwan, Sareenah, Yasin, Dariush, Amina, Azraah, and Aryan.
