A Listener's Guide to… Bowing, 2015. Site specific installation. The Japanese Room, Melbourne School of Architecture & Design, University of Melbourne. Photographs Keelan O'Heir.
The Japanese closes his eyes, lowers his head, and sinks into a long reflection. The Inquirer waits until his guest resumes the conversation, 2015. HD video projection, colour, 4.23min., stereo sound, amplifier, two speakers, Mp3 player, 33.52. Japanese translation & voice by Christine Natsumi. Title from "Heidegger (and the Japanese)", On The Way To Language, 1959, 23.
It’s awkward coming down, 2015, HD video projection from super 8 film, colour, mute, 1.04., stereo sound, amplifier, two speakers, Mp3 player, 33.28.
Standing and doing nothing, 2015, kimono, thread, bells, 157 x 120 x 2cm.
[This Building Absorbs People, Melbourne School of Architecture & Design, Liquid Architecture, Nite Art Melbourne, 2015; The movement of the aside, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne 2018]
In a space set aside, bowing takes the form of a body, a recitation, a forward slant.
Here, in the near distance of inner and outer soundings, listening gathers. Space itself forms an image. Sets of actions or practices, of patterns or forms of interaction continue to resonate.
Working with a discontinuous iterative flow of sound and film in installation, A Listener’s Guide to Bowing proposes a critical form of attention - listening like bowing in a space set aside. The Japanese Room, a reinstated remnant space for commentary, inflects the act of listening. Unhinged from everyday patterns and graspings, the form of attention is a function of the form of attending.