User:Mikhail Karikis

Mikhail Karikis is a Greek-born, London-based visual and sound artist, performer and composer nominated for the prestigious Anglo-Japanese DAIWA Art Prize 2015, the 2013 Celeste Art Prize (Rome) and the 2010 Qwartz Electronic Music Prize (Paris). He trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture [1] at University College London [2] and received a Masters Degree from the Slade School of Fine Art [3], UCL where he also completed his doctorate 'The Acoustics of the Self' in 2006 with an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) [4] scholarship. Karikis's inter-disciplinary practice encompasses video, performance art, installation, composition, photography and drawing in order to investigate the human voice as a sculptural, sonic and physical phenomenon with psychological, social and political dimensions.

Karikis's work first received international attention in 2005, while a university student, when his composition "Once More (in Cof Minor)" [5] was selected for release by singer, composer and pop icon Bjork [6] in a World-wide music competition initiated in response to the devastating Asian tsunami [7] in 2004. His composition featured an abstract use of his voice, with guttural sounds and yells. It appeared on the album Army of Me [8], on the label One Little Indian [9], released for UNICEF [10]. A different version of the same track appeared later on his debut album Orphica (2007) released on the Belgian avat-garde and experimental music label Sub Rosa [11]. Orphica received enthusiastic critical reviews internationally and Karikis was described as a 'sound alchemist'^[1] in Le Monde. Karikis's subsequent projects bridge visual art and sound, appearing in museums, galleries and concert halls.

In 2007, Karikis collaborated with British Afro-Carribbean visual artist Sonia Boyce MBE [12] and Alamire Consort on For you, only you - a project commissioned by the Ruskin School [13], University of Oxford - which explored notions and politics of difference and featured a performance by Karikis using extended vocal techniques or what he calls 'voice sculpture'. Art theorist Jean Fisher [14] wrote about his performance: "he touches our unconscious fear of falling into infans. But at the same time, its enchantment lies in its capacity to vanquish momentarily the speaking subject with its demand for coherent meaning and re-open the self to a space of experience [...] (the) desubjectifying moment necessary to creative and transformative insight."^[2] For you, only you took the form of live performances and a three-screen video installation exhibited in the UK at De la Warr Pavilion, Milton Keynes Gallery, Model Art & Niland Gallery, Locus + at Castle Keep in Newcastle.

In 2009 Karikis received a large commission from a cluster of festivals in South East Kent in the UK which included the Whitstable Biennale [15], Canterbury Festival, Broadstairs Folk Week, among others, with the aim to link the festivals with a single project and raise the international profile of the region. Karikis created XENON, a collaborative inter-disciplinary project which explored notions of the 'stranger'. He described XENON as an 'exploded opera', a term he invented in response to Pierre Boulez's [16] (in)famous quote: "the most elegant solution for the problem of opera is to blow up the opera houses"^[3] . In an interview Karikis explained that his problem with opera is its linear narrative, and in his XENON blog [17] he wrote that Boulez's anger with opera was misplaced by blowing up buildings rather than changing the operatic genre itself. Thinking of opera as a 'super-genre' which embraces many other art forms, Karikis conceived XENON as an opera which unfolded in six different locations, taking the form of live performances, concerts, videos, interactive and audience-participatory installations.

In 2010 Sub Rosa label released Karikis's concept album and interdisciplinary project Morphica [18] which featured sound sounds inspired by his debut Orphica, which were created by several long-standing collaborators including Juice Voice Ensemble, Claudia Molitor, Alamire Consort, Elaine Mitchener, Conall Gleeson, DJ Spooky [19], Leon Mitchener and others. The album was nominated for a QWARTZ Electronic Music Award [20] the same year in the design category.

In 2011, The Highflyer, a character who appeared in XENON and was performed by Karikis, appeared in a series of solo performances commissioned for the Danish Pavilion [21] at the 54th Venice Biennale [22]. The pavilion, curated by Katerina Gregos, was entitled Speech Matters, and the overall Biennale curated by Bice Curiger bore the title ILLUMINATIONS. In an article in a-n, reviewer Alexandra Selwyn-Gray wrote: "The most engaging performance shown was executed by Mikhail Karikis called High-flyer which explored the notion of aspiration, authority and self censorship, engaging with sounds and iconic images."^[4] In 2010-11, different versions of The Highflyer performance by Karikis featured in Festival Filosofia, Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy; Voices Across the World, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, UK, 2011; Performance Festival, 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale, Greece, 2011; More Soup and Tart, Barbican Art Centre, London, UK, 2011; 4 Days, Arnoflni Bristol, UK, 2013.

Sounds from Beneath, an audio-visual work developed in the context of XENON between 2009 and 2011 featured a miners' choir Snowdown Colliery Male Voice Choir. The video was created in collaboration with visual artist Uriel Orlow [23] and has been exhibited widely receiving international critical acclaim. This work was screened in twenty two UK cities with BBC Big Screen as part of the BBC Opera Season [24], and in festivals including the London Literature Festival, Royal Festival Hall (2010) and WOMAD (2012). In 2012, Sounds from Beneath was installed for four months in MANIFESTA 9: the European Biennial of Contemporary Art [25] in mining region of Limburg in Belgium. In the NRC Handelsblad, art journalist Lucette ter Borg wrote: "Deeply touching and subtle is the short video Sounds from Beneath [...] What results is a symphony of drilling, hammering and whistling [...] With Sounds from Beneath Karikis and Orlow raise a monument for mineworkers from all countries and their history that is both deeply personal, melancholy and exuberant." Volkskrant newspaper called Sounds from Beneath "a highlight" of MANIFESTA 9, while the Guardian wrote "brought movingly to visitors in Sounds from Beneath [...] an extraordinary lament in an abandoned mining landscape to the background sounds of forgotten machines."^[5]

In 2012, XENON the film, created under the direction of David Bickerstaff, was launched by the Live Art Development Agency [26], and Karikis's third album Xenofonia [27] was released alongside a publication on his project Sounds from Beneath [28]. In the same year, Karikis's solo installation SeaWomen, which focused on an aging community of female pearl divers on the South Korean island of Jeju, and the sumbisori - a unique breathing technique practiced by the women - was exhibited in Wapping Power Station in London. The project featured on South Korean News Channel YTN [29] and on Austrian TV's Kunstsommer London, directed by Ines Mitterer. In a review in Art Monthly [30] 358 in July 2012, critic Cherry Smyth wrote: "In his moving sound and film installation SeaWomen, 2012, Mikhail Karikis abandons certain cinematic conventions [...] to free up our interaction with his subjects and leave much of their world unknown [...] SeaWomen is a joyful eulogy to a passing way of life." ^[6]

In January 2013, Karikis presented a solo show at the Arnolfini [31] in Bristol exhibiting his project SeaWomen in the form of an immersive mult-screen and twelve-speaker installation curated by Tom Trevor, later shown in PLACE: Roots – Journeying Home, an interdisciplinary festival part of Aldeburgh Music curated by Gareth Evans. In the same month Karikis performed in 4 Days at Arnolfini, an ambitious performance event curated by Jamie Eastman. SeaWomen was subsequently featured in the UK touring exhibitions "Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Deep" in 2013-2014, at Nottingham Contemporary and TATE St Ives, curated by Alex Farquharson and Martin Clark, as well as in "Listening: a Hayward Touring Exhibition" in 2014-2015, curated by Sam Belinfante and shown at Baltic 39 (Newcastle), The Bluecoat Gallery (Liverpool), Site Gallery (Sheffield) and elsewhere. SeaWomen featured at SeMA Biennale/Mediacity Seoul 2014, and was subsequently featured on the South Korean TV channels, KBS1 and TBS. Among numerous art magazine features and newspapers, a feature on SeaWomen appears for the first time in March 2015 in a women's fashion magazine AnOther Spring/Summer 2015.