Brighton Festival

Co-produced by Brighton Festival

Fabrica
Sat 2 – Sun 24 May, 12 noon – 7pm
FREE

Dawn Chorus, by British artist Marcus Coates, uses unique digital methods to explore the relationship between birdsong and the human voice, drawing out similarities between the behaviour of birds and humans.

This immersive multi-screen film installation features 19 individual singers who uncannily recreate birdsong and bird movement. Together they form a chorus that accurately simulates the sounds and timings of a natural dawn chorus.

With each singer depicted in an everyday location: an underground car park, an osteopathic clinic, a bedroom, a bathtub, Dawn Chorus is as much a portrait of British society as it is of the natural world.

Loaned by the Arts Council Collection, South Bank Centre, A Fabrica and Brighton Festival co-production

University of Brighton Gallery
Sat 2 – Sun 24 May
Mon – Sun 10am to 5pm
Thu 10am – 8pm
FREE

Remember that we sometimes demand definitions for the sake not of content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one: the definition is a kind of ornamental coping that supports nothing.

‘The smoothness, the tumescence, the milky flow of feminine nudity anticipates a sensation of liquid outpour, which itself opens onto death like a window onto a courtyard.’

‘But a sort of rupture – in anguish – leaves us at the limit of tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond.’

‘Emerging out of an inconceivable void into the play of beings.’ 2014, Porcelain, Dimensions variable

Oxfordshire-born Kneebone draws on a host of literary and artistic sources in her finely sculpted porcelain work, from Ovid’s Metamorphosis to the surreal, expressive figures of Rodin’s The Gates of Hell. Her sculptures have been exhibited around the world, including solo exhibitions at New York’s Brooklyn Museum and White Cube, Bermondsey.

Circus Street Market
Mon 4 May, 10am – 10pm
Wed & Thu, 1pm – 7pm
Friday & Sat, 10am – 10pm
Sun 10am – 6pm
Closed all Mondays & Tuesday closed
(expect for Bank Holiday Monay 4 May, 10am – 10pm)
FREE

Throughout Brighton Festival, Circus Street Market will be transformed into a playground of investigation into weather, water and scale, developed by Australian creators Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey – award winning sound artists who work with the human experience of listening.

For Gauge, they invited two scientists, Michael Roderick and Adrian Pearce alongside artists Cameron Robbins, whose work uses the forces of the natural world, Graeme Leak, who has a lifetime of working with water in percussion and Rosemary Joy. Incorporating an on-site weather station, Gauge is a sonically-orchestrated environment activated by both the weather and the people within it.

An artistic response to critical issues around water, Gauge offers audiences a hands-on encounter with an array of contemporary and historical apparatus and the chance to witness the effect they have on their environment. At once an exhibition, an installation and a series of talks and performance ‘interruptions’, Gauge invigorates our age-old curiosity in this most vital of substances.

Erode
Alongside the Australian artists, Brighton-based musicians Johanna Bramli & Ed Chivers create a new site-responsive work for the Gauge provocation; Erode is an exploration into time, sound and the certainty of finitude.

ONCA Gallery
Sat 2 – Sun 24 May
Wed – Fri, 12 noon – 7pm
Sat & Sun, 11am – 6pm
FREE

Commissioned by Brighton Festival
A Brighton Festival Exclusive

Murmuration (noun):

1. the act of murmuring, the utterance of a low continuous voicing of dissent

2. a flock

What can we learn from a murmuration of birds? How do we feel when we observe the patterns of birds in flight? And what has observation come to mean in a country where we are subject to more surveillance than at any point in history?

These are the starting points for A Murmuration, a collaborative art project that responds to the Brighton Festival 2015 theme of migration by asking what freedom of movement and thought really means.

In collaboration with writers Helen Macdonald and Olivia Laing, A Murmuration combines film, text, images and cross-artform dialogue to rethink how we frame the natural world, how we understand patterns and just how free is the modern gaze.

University of Brighton Gallery
Sat 2 – Sun 24 May
Mon – Sun 10am – 5pm
Thu 10am – 8pm
FREE

‘I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That’s what I try to do all the time.’ Agnès Varda

We are delighted to celebrate legendary French filmmaker Agnès Varda throughout this year’s Festival programme with a gallery installation, a short selection of her films, plus a very special personal appearance.

Agnès Varda was recently awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the European Film Academy for her outstanding body of work. An outspoken feminist throughout her career, Varda, now 86, has created some of the most interesting female protagonists in 20th-century cinema.

Brighton Festival website