My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself
Frances Libeau
RM Gallery & Project Space, Tāmaki Makaurau

2-26 October 2024
[multimedia installation]

Frustrator (en creux)
Digital video, CRT TV, powered monitor, electromagnetic transducer, sheepskin, pantyhose, scales,
tie-out cable, D-plate. Transducer designed by Brett Ryan.
4:15 duration, looped

Blue Pellicle
Pastry plastic, eyelets, fencing staples

My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself (installation view)
Digital video, 5.1 sound
14:14 duration

On the hoof
Cowbell, latex medical tubing, fencing staples

Tin Shed
Aluminiumised emergency blanket, fencing staples, pinspot light, red gel

My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself (stills)
Digital video, 5.1 sound
14:14 duration

My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself is a multimedia inquiry into biopolitical relations that course through Aotearoa’s agricultural history and one of its knowledge-producing organs: the archive. Bringing a scavenger methodology, Libeau submits various media to remediatory processes that seek to highlight and upset normative notions of animacy and reproductive flow. Notably featured are film and audio from the National Film Unit (documenting agricultural processes in the early/mid twentieth century) along with other, “minor” sculptural materials. Archival offcuts and debris are read (as Ann Laura Stoler implores) against the grain, while possibilities for their fragmented refiguration are conceived from the angled view/s of the inverse/queer body.

Technical errors, material decay and ephemeral detritus (the sound of the projector whirring; an unexpected VHS soap opera taped over by an officially-archived item) yoked to found sound and image lend a hauntological cast to the audiovisual registers. This is amplified by an idiosyncratic disjunct between the aural and ocular, calling to Michel Chion’s en creux (phantom sound; translating directly as ‘in the gap’).

The voice of Alessandro Moreschi, the last known castrato singer (and the only to ever be recorded) — captured on wax cylinder in 1902 singing with the Sistine Chapel choir — cuts through mid-frequency sonic snow of the phonograph with a bitterly mournful madrigal lamenting a vampiric relationship. Through multimedia interferences, My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself probes at notions of capture, reproduction and biopolitical inscription, as well as possible gestures towards refuge and intimacy.

Frances Libeau is an artist and writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. Their sonic compositions, sound designs, and writing feature across diverse platforms of music, art, film and theatre, often exploring material and semantic possibilities of queering sonic compositional and archival practices. They have previously collaborated on works with Sriwhana Spong, Owen Connors, Selina Ershadi and George Watson. My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself is their first solo exhibition.

My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself features excerpts from Come With Us (dir. Garth Maxwell & Simon Marler, 1981) courtesy of the filmmakers and supplied by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. La cruda mia nemica (Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, 1586), performed by Alessandro Moreschi with the Cantori della Cappella Sistina (Sistine Chapel Choir) in 1904, is now in the public domain. All other visual material and most sonic material is drawn from Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga Archives New Zealand open access collection, and adapted under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License. For a full list of featured items, contact the artist.

This work was made with the support of Creative New Zealand and the Karekare House Artists’ Residency. Installed with thanks to Sam Longmore and the Audio Foundation.

All installation photographs by Ardit Hoxha courtesy of RM Gallery.

A visual poem by Tru Paraha, ‘The Flower of My Hope Crushes Beneath You’, written in response to the exhibition is published by RM Gallery here.

Selina Ershadi
چشم چشمه
16mm/VHS two-channel film
My throat/a shelter
Physics Room, Ōtautahi
Curated by Amy Weng

27 October – 10 December 2023
[sound design + exhibition sound design]

Guided by omens, voices and visions, Ershadi’s two-channel film چشم چشمه , 2023, brings together fragments from the artist’s family archive with footage captured while learning to see through the dim viewfinder of a 16mm Bolex camera. Filmed in part while accompanying her mother at an eye clinic in Tāmaki, Ershadi’s work explores various modes of seeing, documenting and recollecting as the eye loses dominion.

The sonic register of the film is composed by sound artist Frances Libeau. It comprises aural textures gleaned from Ershadi’s personal archives, and field recordings subjected to gentle electroacoustic interventions. These include an impromptu performance of a Hafez’s ghazal (ode) called Remembrance accompanied by the tār (a stringed instrument) in a family living room, as well as birdsong, translations and a fractured reading of Earthly Verses from a cassette tape by Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad that has been distorted over time. The viewer encounters the work by moving in a ‘S’ shape between two silk curtains into the main gallery where the film is projected on opposing walls. Following the form of an ouroboros, a symbol which appeared vividly to Ershadi in a fāl, a coffee reading read by her mother, the work moves in two directions at once unsettling linear perception through a cyclical enfolding of veiled, flickering transmissions. These fragments suggest how archives are susceptible to omission and disintegration, and how archival traces might still reverberate in the present.

CUD
Frances Libeau
Pyramid Club [online], Te-Whanganui-a-tara

2022
[stereo audio: sound design, audio mix]

CUD refers to the chewing-over-again of partly digested food eaten by ruminants (animals like cattle, sheep & goats). To ruminate is to think, or dwell on a thought repeatedly – as a creature throws up its meal only to chew it over again.

CUD is a sonic collage intent on reanimating (& ruminating on) a range of ferally scavenged archival media: advertisements for Aotearoa’s meat, milk & farming products; radio cooking shows; queer local cinema; the violent semantics of authoring sound effects; & the hauntological grief of a dance only heard, not seen. The work seeks to explore relations between reproductive/nonreproductive & human/animal bodies, their associated technologies & byproducts through repurposing archival media.

CUD seizes on what Mel Y. Chen refers to as ‘leakages’ between classifications of what is human & what is not, with an emphasis on the idea of “naturalness” & its other, the “unnatural” – a term frequently deployed in reference to queer sex & reproduction. CUD asks you to lean into the leakages, to reiterate & invert them – irrupting the smooth semiotic surface of naturalness’ normative containers.

The word ruminant is derived from the Latin rumen, meaning ‘throat’ – the site of both the voice, & the breath. The recorded singing voice featured at the end of CUD is that of the only Castrato singer ever recorded, Alessandro Moreschi, singing Tosti’s Ideale in 1902. The dancer you can hear panting & stomping is Douglas Wright, dancing Elegy, a piece made in 1993 for his friends who died of AIDS. Spliced together – with reverence – across almost a century, they offer a surrogate lament regurgitated from a gender-bent throat.

CUD opens with an invitation to see, perhaps in line with Barthes’ dictum that to see well, you must close your eyes. I wonder then, if to hear well, one must close one’s ears, or perhaps lean into sounds of the errant, the monstrous, the distorted: the unideal.

George Watson
Beauty Incarnate
Multimedia installation
City Gallery Wellington
Te Whare Toi

1 July–15 October 2023
[sound design + exhibition sound design]

Beauty Incarnate is an installation of sound, text, and sculpture by George Watson (Ngāti Porou, Moriori, Ngāti Mutunga). It encompasses Watson’s recurring interest in modernist Pākehā author Katherine Mansfield, on the 100th anniversary of her death.

George Watson
They Are Cruel
16mm / HD film
Kōtiro, Emepaea
Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery
Curated by Tendai Mutumbu

18 December 2021 — 20 February 2022
[sound design + exhibition sound design]

For the video work They are cruel, Watson has worked closely with sound designer and artist Frances Libeau, editor Anastasia Doniants, voice actors Jordan Mihi Walker and Rose McGrannachan, filmmaker and artist Selina Ershadi, and wood worker and artist Josephine Jelicich to build and film a set which reimagines scenes from Mansfield’s 1907 short story, ‘Summer Idyll’. The resulting exhibition is an immersive filmic and sculptural installation, both of which pull apart quintessential forms of the colonial villa, as a meditation on Te Ao Pākehā and the often unsettling nature of settlement.

– Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Art Gallery

Sriwhana Spong
Now Spectral, Now Animal
16mm / HD film

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
22 February — 7 June 2020

Edinburgh Arts Festival
25 July – 25 August 2019

Walters Prize 2020 Nomination –
Sriwhana Spong

[film sound design, composition, audio mix]

Sriwhana Spong’s Now Spectral, Now Animal, (2019/20) is a multi-media installation that explores the writings of the 16th-century mystic St Teresa of Avila, whose book, The Interior Castle, describes an imaginary architectural space in which women can freely think, write and speak. Spong’s work considers how a fictional space created through text can be a site for agency.

– Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

Artist in Residence: Pantograph Punch
Seven Suns
Stereo audio

2020

[writing, sound design, music production, audio mix, performance]
[theme music w/ Ruby Solly]

Nisha Madhan: When there is no sun
Stereo audio

[sound design, music production, audio mix]
[theme music w/ Ruby Solly]

Sriwhana Spong
a hook but no fish
16mm / HD film

Pump House Gallery, UK
10 January – 1 April 2018

Govett Brewster Gallery, NZ
12 May – 22 July 2018

[sound design, music composition, audio mix]

Central to the exhibition is a new film, with a score by musician [Frances Libeau], based on the artist’s research into the 12th century German mystic Hildegard von Bingen. [...] Central to the film is the Lingua Ignota (unknown language) said to have been received by divine inspiration. It is thought to have been a secret language used to increase solidarity amongst Hildegard and her sisters.

– Govett Brewster Gallery

Women in Love with mother?
i.e. crazy X Frances Libeau

mother? gallery, Auckland
15 December 2018

[installation and performance: stereo audio, dirt, roses, sheepskin, photographs, nails, candles, megaphone]

mother? presents Women in Love with mother? by Frances Libeau; an inquiry into psycho-sexual feminine power and the forces that seek to constrain it. The ongoing performative & recorded work of i.e. crazy (aka Maggie Magee) gathers shards of sonic debris and forgotten pop-culture detritus and braids them together with refractive, idiosyncratic narrative folk-voices. Tendrils of conventional reportage are splayed and teased out with ex-scientific mores in an attempt to interrogate the complex lattice of sensuality, power and violence that comprises feminine identity.

Medusa
Julia Croft, Virginia Frankovich & Nisha Madhan
Zanetti Productions

Circa Theatre
21 September - 6 October 2018
Q Theatre
24 October - 3 November 2018

[multi-channel sound design, composition, performance sound design]

Awards
+Wellington Theatre Awards 2018 Nomination – Sound Designer of the Year
+Auckland Theatre Awards 2018 Winner – Excellence in Sound Design

From acclaimed feminist theatre makers Julia Croft, Virginia Frankovich and Nisha Madhan comes a new work of dissection and dissent on female bodies, female violence and female rage. With Medusa as their muse, and Jill Soloway as their spiritual guide, Medusa is a blood boiler, a stealthy deconstruction, and one of feminism's great reclamations.

– Zanetti Productions