Yifei Tang

We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds

Breath Mark x Lisa Hall & Hannah Kemp-Welch

Breath Mark, a curatorial collective formed as part of the RCA’s MA Curating Contemporary Art programme, has commissioned sound artists Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch for Furtherfield’s People’s Park Plinth. Furtherfield strives to produce work that gives people a shared sense of ownership of their lives and localities and in 2021 People’s Park Plinth is imagining the whole of Finsbury Park as a platform for public digital art where people can explore a range of artworks and then choose the one they want to experience more of. Hall and Kemp-Welch’s work will be voted on in August, and has the potential to be expanded into a three part listening experience that takes the themes of connection across species further.

Hall and Kemp-Welch present a listening experience taking you on a journey through the park, suggesting new ways of experiencing this vital green space. Turning up the volume on non-human inhabitants in Finsbury Park, the sonic artwork creates moments of connection between strangers of all species. You can tune into the voices of different park user groups and sounds of many species on your digital devices: scan a QR code located outside of the Furtherfield Gallery to open a sound-based navigation system, developed in collaboration with Studio Hyte. This leads you to a place where you can pause, listen and consider the social and ecological concerns of the area. The destination serves as a meeting point, forming new, shifting listening communities across the park and amplifying the voices of local park user groups.

As part of extended public engagement, Breath Mark has collaborated with design studio An Endless Supply, on a digital microsite acting as a reading room allowing audiences to further engage with the artwork’s themes.

Look for the companions around you.

Draw closer to the unheard, the silenced, the unwanted sounds.

Tune in, feel, communicate.

Extend your senses and rest in them.

Yifei Tang is a curator working beyond the normal workflow of curating by exploring alternative narratives that represent the serendipities hidden within our cultural forgetting. She considers curating as an integral part of (art) practices, which not only situates the curatorial thinking in a wider body of knowledge exchanges, but also interrupts the conventional presumptions of our domains - art. Her thinking takes the movements of alternative narratives and approaches as a departure point and aims to converse with different curatorial mechanisms among art institutions, independent projects, other(-ed) disciplines, social relations, and on.

In her postgraduate dissertation, Curatorial turn under Post-socialism, she attempts to establish a more active and open language of critique that provides the room for more diverse narratives, and to re-contextualise a globalised curatorial infrastructure which roots for a de-centralised and counter-hegemonic idea. A powerful articulation of post-socialism speaks: it is to stimulate the possibility of other worlds that may exist and to uncover the potential that is steeped in history.

For her graduate project, Yifei Tang co-curated We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds, in partnership with Furtherfield. As it presents a site-specific digital listening experience, the web app is a portal to a space that allows co-existence between humans and other species. Through an exploration of sound and psychogeography, Finsbury Park becomes the “plinth” for re-mapping and re-constructing the locality.

Yifei has recently curated Artist Dish (2020-2021), an online experiment for exploring the rationales and workflows of artists'. By representing these contemporary conditions and restrictions, the project aims to contest the empty terminologies or taxonomies in contemporary art scenes, and deconstruct the curatorial languages.

The People’s Park Plinth, Furtherfield, 2021 — designed by Studio Hyte

Launch Project

Voting will start soon! Stay tuned!

We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds, Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch, 2021 — designed by Studio Hyte

Breath Mark Collective; designed by Kevin Bello.

Launch Project

Breath Mark Collective; designed by Kevin Bello. — Inspired by musical scores, we chose the symbol of a breath mark to represent ourselves as a curatorial collective. We understand a breath mark as an indication of a pause that reminds us to rethink the fast-paced tempo of our daily lives. Besides punctuating musical notation, a breath mark also opens up a space for critical reflection and reveals things that have been lost in the constant repetition of quotidian tasks. https://www.instagram.com/breathmark_collective/

Launch Project

Reading Room — designed by An Endless Supply

Yifei Tang

Social

About

Royal College of Art