Mechanical Hymns
Fri-Sat
Jan 10–11, 2025
various times, see below for details
$5-$10
What Lab 1814 Pandora St.
Image by Alan Derksen
About the Show
Mechanical Hymns is an exhibition of factory machines repurposed into custom-made instrument(s). The cathartic and droning machine hymns recreate soundscapes from the artist’s childhood experience of visiting her mother at a garment factory featuring the sounds of machines, women’s voices in multiple languages conversing in harmony all at once (but often seen as noise and disruptive), and a cassette player running droning religious music in the background – an interesting contrasting of the meditative with aggressive machines.
This sound palette featuring “noise” dominant sounds was impressed onto the artist at a young age and has influenced her to research and dig into the role of noise and negative connotations applied to it. This work takes this research a step deeper.
Mechanical Hymns asks the visitor to interrogate our assumptions about what noise, quiet, and silence mean and represent. This showing at What Lab invites visitors to interact with the instruments.
Performance Details
January 10th – Guest artist performing with the custom-made instruments, follow by Q + A with creator Anju Singh.
Doors at 7pm, show at 7:30pm. $10 tickets
January 11th – Bring yourself and/or a group of friends for a private, self-led, interactive session with the Artist’s custom-made instruments. No experience necessary. Your improvisations will be recorded and potentially used in future iterations of this work.
Pre-booked 15 min slots from 5pm-7pm, please reserve in advance. $5 per group, regardless of size.
About the Artist
Anju Singh experiments with texture, sound, images, and compositional structure in her practice and work as a sound designer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, performer, noise/sound artist, media artist, and curator. Her work engages in a practice of deconstruction and reanimation as process-based methods and plays with the application of contrasting themes and boundary/volume stressing experimental elements. As an interdisciplinary artist, she works in music, media arts, performance, theatre, film and opera. She has toured, presented and performed her work across Canada, in Europe, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and the United States.
Accessibility Info
What Lab is located at 1814 Pandora Street. There is no dedicated parking, only street parking. The venue is located on the second floor up one flight of stairs, but there is a ground level accessible entrance through the back of the building. Seating is typically informal, and will include some combination of chairs, floor seating, couches, and cushions. There is one single-occupancy, gender-inclusive washroom. The washroom is not big enough for larger style wheelchairs to completely turn around in while the door is open. We are a trans-inclusive space.
This presentation is funded in part by
