On Friday, March 21st at 8pm, ISSUE Project Room presents “Arrow & Synchronicity” by French multidisciplinary artist Annabelle Playe. Between March 20-22, the organization will present new, live performance scores at its 22 Boerum Pl. theater as part of ongoing activations of the With Womens Work Series. The evening will conclude with a panel conversation moderated by writer-researcher Sami Hopkins (2021 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow), featuring artists Audrey Chen, crys cole, and original Womens Work creator Annea Lockwood.
The work that has led to “Arrow & Synchronicity” stretches back between present day and the pandemic, when ISSUE first commissioned Playe for the With Womens Work Series. In 2021, she produced Ad Astra, a series of musical pieces born of the solar system for online streaming inspired by the "ZODIACAL MEDITATION" score by Julie Winter included in the original Womens Work Volume #1, 1975. Her new project serves as a sequel to Ad Astra, taking further inspiration from Winter’s score. Together, these pieces form a diptych, a dramaturgy of time—a musical hourglass refocusing us on our perceptions, a meditation. It will also serve as a response to Winter that weaves a dialogue between two creators echoing all women artists, two continents, and several eras and temporalities. Through powerful drones and textures, “Arrow & Synchronicity” is a way of taking care of the collective through vibration.
In recent years, societies have been gripped by powerful, eruptive and unexpected events, strongly impacting the collective and the individual on a global level. In response to this, Playe asks: are we going through a “phoenix” period involving a profound transformation of our patterns to be reborn collectively to other modes of relationships, and links with living things? “In my opinion, synchronicity is one of the precious modalities of the relationship between beings and living things that we could develop and enhance. This synchronicity crosses time and space, connecting us in a vibrational way, including with the circle of the cosmos, the planets of our solar system, reminding us that we are a part of the whole, at the same time. A quantum mode of relationship!”
The archive is not neutral. At ISSUE, we strive to help artists expose and redress the historical record and structures of power relating to sex and gender. The ongoing With Womens Work Series aims to continuously activate and grow the accounts of women’s experiences and practices in the avant-garde canon, while honoring the legacy of artists who have built and contributed to it over the years.
Annabelle Playe is a multidisciplinary artist. Her music is oscillating between electroacoustic, drone, and noise. She was an associate composer with “Scènes Croisées de Lozère” (France). She is currently associate composer at the Montpellier Opera in France (2024-26). She is a twice winner of the SACD fund "Musique de Scène" (2018 and 2021). She received the SACD New Talent Music Award 2019. She performed at Avignon Festival (2019-2021) and she was selected by the Face Foundation for a tour in the US (2019), and was also a winner of Biennale Chroniques (2020) and of Diaphonique fund (2022). Annabelle regularly performs internationally.
Panelist Bios:
Audrey Chen As a 2nd generation Taiwanese American living in Berlin, Audrey Chen`s work continuously explores the displacement of story and history due to the migration and integration processes, loss and adoption of language, untold stories, and how the past can be accessed through inherited and lived experience. Her practice is deeply intertwined with this act of invocation, calling upon the physical body to remember beyond the limitations of its own memory. Through extreme, un-processed hyperextensions of her voice in tandem with the chaotic glitch of a Ciat Lonbarde “Fourses” synthesiser, she invokes a highly amplified joint resonant body/space transforming itself in a feedback loop of imagination, touch, vibration, sound and aural sensation. For over two decades, she has been touring extensively, appearing worldwide and aside from her solo concerts, Chen performs currently in her longest running duo project since 2005 with Phil Minton; as BEAM SPLITTER with trombonist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø; as MOPCUT with Lukas Koenig and Julien Desprez; with electronic music artist Kaffe Matthews; with American sound artist Nick Klein and as a duo for voice/live digital process with Mexican sound artist Hugo Esquinca.
crys cole is a Canadian sound artist based in Berlin (DE) whose work includes composition, performance, sound sculpture and installation. Taking a conceptual approach, she generates subtle and imperfect sounds through haptic gestures and seemingly mundane materials to create texturally nuanced electro-acoustic works that continuously retune the ear. cole has performed extensively worldwide as a solo artist and with various collaborators including Oren Ambarchi (AU) James Rushford (AU, as Ora Clementi), Tetuzi Akiyama (JP), David Rosenboom (US), Annea Lockwood (US/NZ), Keith Rowe (UK) and many more. She has presented her work at festivals, events and institutions including; Presence Electronique (FR), the Walker Art Center (US), Editions Festival (SW + JP), Tectonics Festival (US + AU), Vancouver New Music (CA), Akademie der Kunste (DE), Art Gallery of New South Wales (AU), Archipel Festival (CH), BACC (TH), café Oto (UK) and many more. Cole’s sound installations and sculptures often investigate ideas around impermanence, temporality, memory and illusion, with a particular interest in simple everyday materials and site specificity. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, the UK, Spain, Switzerland and Thailand.
Sami Hopkins is an artist and musician between Philadelphia and New York. Across projects, their work concerns the interplay between subjective experience, social (political, symbolic) context, and the materials these encounters produce. Sami was a Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow at ISSUE Project Room in 2021, a Critical Writing Fellow at Recess, and recently completed a 2023 Christiania Research Residency.
New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood brings vibrant energy, ceaseless curiosity, and a profound sense of openness to her music. Lockwood’s lifelong fascination with the visceral effects of sound in our environments and through our bodies—the way sounds unfold and their myriad “life spans”—serves as the focal point for works ranging from concert music to performance art to multimedia installations. In recent years Lockwood and her music have received widespread attention, including a Columbia University Miller Theatre Composer Portrait concert, a feature article in The New York Times, a SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award, a documentary film by director Sam Green, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and most recently, a 2024 Fromm Foundation Commission. Her recent collaborative works Into the Vanishing Point with the ensemble Yarn/Wire and Becoming Air with avant-garde trumpeter Nate Wooley were released on Black Truffle Records to great acclaim. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals such as Lucerne Festival, Tectonics Athens Festival, Signale Graz, Counterflows International Festival of Music and Art, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and many others. Lockwood has received commissions from numerous ensembles and solo performers, including Bang On A Can, baritone Thomas Buckner, pianists Sarah Cahill, Lois Svard, and Jennifer Hymer, the Holon Scratch Orchestra, Essential Music, Yarn/Wire, and Issue Project Room. Her music is recorded on the Lovely, XI, Mutable, Pogus, EM Records (Japan), Rattle Records, Recital, Harmonia Mundi, CRI, Superior Viaduct, Black Truffle, New World, Gruenrekorder, and Moving Furniture Records. Hearing Studies, co-authored with Ruth Anderson, was published by Open Space in 2021.
