Cara Tolmie
13.5 – 26.8 2023
Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm
Opening hours:
Wed-Fri 13-18
Saturday 12-16
Cascade Bend Chamber is a major new commission at Mint, led by artist and musician Cara Tolmie. It takes shape through installation, music and performance and is made in dialogue with various collaborators including, amongst others, Julia Giertz, Susanna Jablonksi and live performances with Stine Janvin and Em Silèn.
The project at large stems from a vocal method that Cara Tolmie has been developing over the past five years called Internal Singing. This is a practice that explores a sensitised voice-body bind by investigating the relationship between sounding on both the inhale and exhale, vocal imaginaries, slight movement, circular vocal sound, and self administered touch that calms her body in states of over-sensitivity.
The exhibition hosts a series of listening spaces that explore components expanding out from Internal Singing. These environments are constructed from textiles, sonic objects, sound and sculpture, inviting the audience into an enigmatic landscape built to hold and guide them through various states of listening and bodily attention. Across each of the three rooms the elements of listening, presence and sound weave together, presenting an experience of vocality in multiplicity, persistently in movement – coaxing, calming, amusing, disorientating and at times discomforting.
Throughout the exhibition there will also be a series of performances that bring to the fore the particular qualities of the live singing voice.. Using the various listening rooms as stages or sets for these musical gatherings, each performance will use elements of vocal improvisation in order to explore new co-produced landscapes of affect, vocal multiplicity and the curious territory of unknowns that exist in between.
Cara Tolmie (b. 1984, Glasgow, Scotland) works in the intersections of performance-making, installation, experimental music and the moving image. Her practice centres itself upon the voice and the body, and the complex ties between the two. Cara Tolmie often probes techniques that reassess practices of listening and allow for the political and poetic dimensions of the voice to emerge. She has exhibited and performed at Borealis Festival, Bergen, Modern Art Museum, Stockholm and KW Berlin among other places. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Konstfack, the University of Arts, Craft and Design, Stockholm.