Johann Hällsten (SE): Everyday opera

A city wakes, works and sleeps, it opens for business in the morning and closes again in the evening – an endless cycle of beginnings and endings. Everyday Opera playfully underlines those otherwise unnoticed moments of opening and closing, by seeing in the new and seeing out the old with a dramatic burst of song. As the railway station, the library, the swimming pool, the market hall and the donor centre open for the day, the first contact – the first swimmer, traveller, or blood donator – will be accompanied by a piece of live opera, sung as a way of ushering in the day’s coming drama, no matter how mundane. The same service is repeated for the day’s end – the final swimmer, traveller, and blood donator will be sung out as they leave the building and the building closes. Join us at the beginning and the end of each day, as Everyday Opera gives celebratory voice to the drama of everyday life.

Johann Hällsten (SE)

Johanna Hällsten was born in Sweden and lives in the UK. She has shown her work widely across the UK and Europe. Recent projects include Episode 1: Acute Melancholia at Studio 44, Stockholm, and Trying To Cope With Things That Aren’t Human (Part One), at DCP, San Francisco. Johanna is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Loughborough University, UK.

“Often working site-specifically, utilising sound as a key element of the interventions, I am interested in the perpetual cycle of translation between words and speech, speech and the visual, visual and auditory, auditory and words and so on. Language and music are recurring themes, where interpretation systems are being unravelled and reassembled again to create absurd yet playful encounters between what is known (established) and virtual (mysterious).  I seek to position the audience centrally in the performance of the artwork.”

www.johannahallsten.com