Koffler Centre of the Arts

A siren is a mysterious coastal bird/woman who, like the mermaid, is known to seafaring folk for her mesmerizing call and beguiling beauty. Her song is an exquisite beacon and a spellbinding lure.

Siren III is a new video and sound installation by Toronto artist nichola feldman-kiss, building upon her series of politically provocative artworks that mine the local context and articulate reflections on worldwide stressors driving global migration, flights from homelands, and oceanic passages. Referencing traumatic histories alongside contemporary conditions of oppression rooted in conquest, border rule, and climate change, the artist’s current explorations remain anchored in autobiography and ancestry.

In the installation, a monumental moving image immerses the viewer into the Atlantic’s unsettling depths, resonant with the present absences of migrant, exiled, and enslaved people transported over centuries of forced displacement. The camera frames a subjective view of the turbulent water, turning each viewer into a lone protagonist lost at sea. Seeking the sunlight that penetrates the ocean’s surface, the gaze wavers, at times piercing through, then sinking into the all-encompassing teal blue, and eventually ascending back toward the sky.

Descending, the camera’s movements are calm, exploratory, perhaps entranced. An iceberg’s massive underbelly comes into view and is approached with curiosity. The gaze caresses sensuous ice slopes and looks for entry through their crevices. The visual landscape seamlessly shifts from underwater cinematography to a digital environment, crafting a virtual, beguiling vision, both real and imagined.

Struggle, descent, drifting, and ascension are witnessed by a chorus of ululations that envelop the visitor within a volumetric soundscape. Common to feminine cultures across Africa, the Middle East, India, and their diasporas, ululations accompany ritual events and rites of passage such as births, weddings, and funerals. Whether celebratory or mournful, these vocal improvisations mark existential transitions, welcome arrivals, or perform a send-off into journey. Regional nuances are often influenced by political ideologies and societal codes that govern women’s freedom to convey their emotions.

The polyphonic harmonies of Siren III derive from Toronto’s unique multicultural context, integrating sonic variances that converged here through countless waves of migration, just like the artist’s own familial lineages. Evoking the mythical sea creatures known to tempt sailors toward rocky shores and certain death with their enchanting song, the powerful chorus suggests an uncanny lure as well as a protective warning. These trilling sirens’ purpose is more ambiguous, signaling both danger and rescue. They are guiding companions rather than threat, their visceral calls pulling the drowning back to life.

Development of Siren III began before the rising spread of COVID-19 and was later profoundly impacted by the pandemic. Relinquishing control and opening up to new possibilities, feldman-kiss embraced an intensely collaborative process and an intuitive response to imposed conditions. Remote cooperation strategies made possible the capture of underwater footage off the coast of Newfoundland; then video production turned to a mixed technique imbedding 3D animation within the initial recordings.

In these still unfolding circumstances, Siren III takes on new meanings as our collective fears and distress deepen amid a relentless menace. Reflecting on such innermost anxieties, inherited traumas, and lived ordeals, feldman-kiss articulates a meditation on the value of human life and an homage to the survival drive. In the face of devastation—a deadly virus, social unrest, economic hardship, war, and ecological collapse—Siren III offers a promise of solace, community, and delivery from troubled waters.

Read insights into nichola feldman kiss' process of developing Siren III in IN THE WORKS: nichola feldman-kiss.

nichola feldman-kiss is a first-generation Canadian artist of Caribbean, African, European and Jewish heritage. The artist's practice is a performative and relational exploration of body and embodiment, statelessness and belonging, identity and autobiography, witness and traumatic memory, empathy and collectivity. feldman-kiss’s hybrid media installations – pristine as laboratory craft – critique the colonial paradigm – the violent ingestion of land, resources, peoples and cultures and ask us to reconsider the hard questions about being conscious social bodies among the tattered boundaries of globalization. Her art and technology innovations and institutional interventions have been hosted by the National Research Council of Canada, the Ottawa Hospital Eye Institute, the Department of National Defence and the United Nations, among others. feldman-kiss has consulted on the development of Canadian new media art research policy since 2001. The artist holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, and currently lives and works in Toronto.

Siren (2018–) is among nichola feldman-kiss's continuing artworks concerning relative human value, contemporary nomadism and the celebration of arrival.

Siren is a vocal collaboration unfolding with gratitude to Lodi Awad (Syria), Valerie Buhagiar (Matla / Canada), Blandine Kan (DR Congo), Memory Makuri (Zimbabwe), Ruth Mathiang (South Sudan), Leila Mosemi (Iran), Roula Said (Palestine / Canada), Mabinty Sylla (Guinea), Maryem Toller (Egypt / Canada).

Siren technical collaborators are Michelle Irving (sound designer), Canterbury Music Company (recording studio), Ocean Quest (underwater cinematography), Caroline Christie (editor), Adrienne Matheuszik (studio assistant). Siren has been generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council 2019 and 2020.

Siren III

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