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.

Toronto artist nichola feldman-kiss’s recent artworks are locally-focused reflections on worldwide stressors that drive global migration, flights from homelands and oceanic passages. Referencing traumatic histories alongside contemporary conditions of oppression and displacement while also grappling with mounting environmental concerns, the artist’s current explorations remain anchored in ancestry and autobiography.

Siren III is feldman-kiss’s new immersive audio/video installation and continuation of her Siren series that evolved from a 2018 Toronto Island performance commissioned by Artspin Toronto. A monumental moving image captures the underside of the Atlantic Ocean, a site of mass migration, exile and the forced transatlantic passage of enslaved and indentured peoples.

The visuals seamlessly mix underwater cinematography recorded off the coast of Newfoundland with digitally crafted, virtual underwater environments, offering a new vision, both real and imagined. This mixed technique was developed as part of new remote collaboration strategies responding to COVID-19 restrictions. Ululations envelop the visitor in a volumetric soundscape.

No body is present – just the camera’s intimate dance with the ocean’s turbulent membrane. An iceberg passes. Ululations perform witness to the underwater scene. The sequence invokes at once, a drowning, an ascension and a birth.

Ululations are improv vocal expressions common to feminine cultures of the global south. They are performed individually and collectively as a kind of vocal applause, celebrating arrival and clearing paths forward. The ululation trill is diverse to geography and reflects political ideologies that govern women’s relative freedom to express and emote. Siren harmonics arise from sonic diversity among geo-specific vocalizations in polyphonic play. While this ancient vocal tradition has moved about Africa, the Middle East and diaspora over millennia of nomadic passages, certain sonic innovations to ululation are uniquely possible within polycultural contexts such as Toronto. The powerful Siren voices combine native ululation practice with professional vocal talent.

Siren III crystallizes feldman-kiss’s career-long exploration of the uncanny. In her artworks, the uncanny operates as a kind of kinaesthetic curiosity that willfully tugs at the emotional body. Ululation is an uncanny manifestation – apriori language – deep, visceral, familiar communication, meaning-full, yet anchored to no syntactical system.

Siren III is conceived as Welcome – a collective sonic embrace celebrating our return to, and delivery from, common waters. The artwork honors the urgent will to survival through tenacious journeys into unknown futures and invokes ambivalent emotions associated with grand passages and existential transitions.

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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