SIREN by nichola feldman kiss | A three-part gathering

Session 1: Film and Discussion (Small Small World Theatre, 180 Shaw Street) 2:30- 3:30 pm
Session 2: Closing Conversation (Koffler Gallery, 180 Shaw Street) 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm
Session 3: Performance and light reception (Koffler Gallery, 180 Shaw Street) 5-6 pm

Session 1: Public Loss and Public Mourning (Small World Theatre, 180 Shaw Street) 2:30- 3:30 pm

Film Screening: Dear Friend, I Can No longer Hear Your Voice
Year: 2022
Format: HD Video
Director: Anne-Marie Creamer
Music: Verity Standen
Photogrammetry: John Griffin, Arcminute CGI
Animation: Edmund Brown
Producers: Anne-Marie Creamer & Gary Thomas
This film was a site-specific commission for the Sir John Soane's Museum in London, the former home of Georgian England’s leading architect.

In conversation with curator, Karen Alexander, exhibiting artist nichola feldman-kiss and Cultural historian and curator, Dr. Michael Prokopow.

This immersive film accurately reconstructs a lost space at the museum, formerly the home and workplace of Sir John Soane - the bedchamber of his wife Eliza, who died suddenly and tragically in 1815. Soane, who was knighted in 1831 for his accomplishments, was one of the foremost architects of Britain’s Regency era. Through a combination of photogrammetry, CGI animation, sound, voice and song, the film is an imagined recreation of Eliza's bedchamber and a reclamation of Eliza's presence. Themes of public loss and mourning and the use of the female voice–featured in the film as well as in SIREN–will be explored in conversation with curator Karen Alexander and SIREN artist nichola feldman-kiss.

Post-screening discussion

Themes of personal and public loss and mourning present in the film, and the use of the female voice with be explored in conversation with curator Karen Alexander and SIREN artist nichola feldman-kiss, facilitated by Dr. Michael J. Prokopow.

About the film maker:

UK-based artist Anne-Marie Creamer reimagines the space and presence of Eliza Soane's wife, who unexpectedly passed away following an extended illness. An intense sense of mourning and loss is conjured up via the use of a choral soundtrack by composer Verity Standen with the artist writing lyrics based on John Soane's letters and diaries. This immersive film accurately reconstructs a lost space at the museum, formerly the home and workplace of Sir John Soane - the bedchamber of his wife Eliza, who died suddenly and tragically in 1815. John Soane never got over her death, preserving her bedchamber for 19 years, and later creating private allusions to Eliza throughout the museum. A haunting soundtrack uses Soane's own memoir of his grief at Eliza's death to create a meditation on love and loss. Through a combination of photogrammetry, CGI animation, sound, voice and song, the film is an imagined recreation of Eliza's bedchamber and a reclamation of Eliza's presence (Sir John Soane's Museum Website).

About the artist

nichola feldman-kiss creates across disciplines with emphasis on relational, lens and hybridmedia technologies presented as social engagement, institution intervention and public installation. feldman-kiss’s process-rich research proposes identity as a fugitive concept while focusing on the body as a contested site of cultural production. nichola feldman-kiss art and technology innovations and institution interventions have been hosted by the National Research Council of Canada, the Ottawa Hospital Eye Institute, Canada's Department of National Defence, and the United Nations among others. nichola holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. They are a first-generation Canadian of the Caribbean diaspora and a repatriated citizen of Germany and Jamaica live working between Toronto (Tkaronto) and rural Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk).

About the curator

Karen Alexander is a London-based independent film and moving image curator and researcher. She has worked with and for the Royal College of Art and the British Film Institute and as a guest curator for a wide range of UK-based cultural institutions and art galleries, including Iniva, the Serpentine Gallery Up Projects, Tate, Autograph, London and the Watershed Bristol.

About Dr. Michael J. Prokopow

Dr. Michael J. Prokopow is a cultural historian and curator. His areas of expertise include material culture, aesthetics and design history. He has written widely about material life and domesticity and is currently working on a project on middle class taste in North America between 1940 and 1975. Between 2004 and 2008, he was curator of the Design Exchange, Canada's only museum of 20th century industrial design. In 2012, he was co-curator of –Museum for the End of the World "The Monumental Project, Scotia Bank Nuit Blanche, in Toronto. In addition, in 2011 he curated an exhibition on the work of architect and theorist George Baird at the Daniels Faculty of Landscape, Architecture and Design and he was co-curator of the Leona Drive Project, a site specific installation in Willowdale, Ontario. Currently he is working on an exhibition on the roles of Scandinavian aesthetics in Canadian design culture between 1920 and the present and a project for the New York Times on prison architecture and the aesthetics of incarceration.

Session 2: Closing Conversation: Healing Through Collaboration​ (Koffler Gallery, 180 Shaw Street)
3:45 pm - 4:45 pm

For the exhibition’s closing conversation Karen Alexander will discuss co-creativity with artist, nichola feldman-kiss and Siren lll vocal collaborators. nichola feldman-kiss and a selection of female vocalists share details of their practice and collaboration on SIREN lll in conversation with Karen Alexander.

Session 3: Performance and light reception (Koffler Gallery, 180 Shaw Street) 5-6 pm

SIREN is a solo exhibition by the Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist nichola feldman-kiss. At the core of SIREN is reflection on concepts of diaspora, migration and displacement, the paradox of national boundaries and borders within an ecology of elemental flows. A new large-scale immersive installation of digital photography, specially commissioned by the Koffler Gallery for SIREN, sits alongside contextual artworks, which together dynamically engage stories of traumatic oceanic crossings and the geopolitics of the climate emergency intertwined with colonial narratives and diasporic themes of movement and migration. Siren lll is sculptural in form. A ceiling-mounted grid of LED video panels is suspended askew toward two plantation teak steamer chairs framed by a plastic turf rug. The artwork is a meditation on boundaries and borders between the past and the present –abstracted aquatic depictions, and digital animations are set against an arresting ambisonic soundscape of disembodied voices. Siren III weaves a haunting elliptical narrative of panic, submersion, and seemingly last-minute survival.

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