Kat will headline the Leaky Earth programme at Technische Sammlung Dresden with The Matter of the Soul | Symphony. For this special performance, Kat has invited Korean media artist Dongjoo Seo to perform live visuals drawing on explorations of mining landscapes and transformation of bodies. The evening begins with screenings of films by the inimitable Rosa Barba.
Kat will perform her album This Land is Not Mine as part of the dotolim concert series.
dotolim is a longstanding experimental music venue and recording studio run by Jin Sangtae, which hosts performances and concerts with people with different perspectives in various fields, as well as film screenings and exhibitions.
The “This Land is Not Mine” LP combines 7 songs by musician and sound artist Kat Austen. Austenmelds acoustic and electronica with field recordings, in this homage to a landscape ravaged by open cast mining: Lusatia, at the German-Polish border. Realised over the course of 2 years, This Land is Not Mine is a modern-day protest album, telling the stories of villages lost to the past, rivers that harbour secrets and communities that rebuild in the wake of mine closures.
Austen’s musical roots hail back to classical piano, metal and folk. Since 2018, Austen has been releasing music that mixes field recordings and ambient electronic sounds with traditional instruments to create a unique and evocative sonic tapestry.
Some field recordings for the album were gathered through a crowdsourcing platform Lausitzklang that explores the sounds of Lusatia.
Worthing Museum and Art Gallery, Chapel Road, Worthing, West Sussex, BN11 1HP, UK
We’re delighted that Anders will be performing Mapping Gender with Kat’s soundscape in the Main Gallery at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery in February.
Mapping Gender is a multisensory exhibition of dance, image, scent, sound and research. It’s an invitation to explore the parallels between cartography and historical clothing through a lens of non-binary experiences. Created by Anders Duckworth in collaboration with sound artist Kat Austen, Mapping Gender looks at landscapes, the way we draw borders and create boundaries on maps to carve up geographical space whilst also asking us to explore how we look at the body and how we use gender to carve and divide people.
We are delighted to announce the performance premiere of Mapping Gender – a creation by Anders Duckworth in collaboration with Kat Austen – at The Place in London this autumn.
Three years in the making, Mapping Gender explores the synchrony between power dynamics applied to bodies and to landscapes.
Mapping Gender is a multisensory exhibition of dance, image, scent, sound and research. It’s an invitation to explore the parallels between cartography and historical clothing through a lens of non-binary experiences. Created by Anders Duckworth in collaboration with sound artist Kat Austen, Mapping Gender looks at landscapes, the way we draw borders and create boundaries on maps to carve up geographical space whilst also asking us to explore how we look at the body and how we use gender to carve and divide people.
Created with nine interdisciplinary artists and a group of trans/non-binary volunteers, Mapping Gender includes selections from a series of recorded interviews with non-binary people discussing their personal experiences. By drawing together people who exist on the margins and the ‘in-between’ spaces we open up new possibilities and provide an opportunity to re-discover the place and complexities we find in gender.
Performance Information
Date: 28th September 2022
Location: The Place, 17 Duke’s Road, London, WC1H 9PY
On Saturday Kat will be playing alongside Anders Duckworth’s performance of Mapping Gender as part BALTIC is Curious. Kat has collaborated with Anders on Mapping Gender over the last 2.5 years, creating the sound and music for this exhibition of performance, image, sound and research. It’s an invitation to see the parallels between cartography and clothing, to explore how society controls, shapes and demarcates both landscapes and human bodies – all told through the lens of non-binary experiences.
In creating the soundscape over the last two years Kat has carried out research in liminal spaces – at coasts, riversides and boundaries. In Saturday’s performance, she will use her hacked scientific equipment to play sounds from a water sample that she collected from the Baltic Sea in December last year alongside water from outside the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art.
Tuesday 26th June
20:00 and 22:00, online and 88,4 MHz in Berlin, 90,7 MHz in Potsdam
Artists Kat Austen and Kirsty Kross will join Kate Donovan on elements, to discuss our relationship with the marine environment and how the internet changes identity.
