The Anatomy of Voice: Two Views on the Exhibition Post-Opera (“Tent” gallery and “V2_Lab for the Unstable Media”, Rotterdam, April 19 – June 30 and May 3–26 2019)

Ivana Ilić; Iva Nenić

Ivana Ilić University of Arts in Belgrade, Faculty of Music, Department of Music Theory
Iva Nenić University of Arts in Belgrade, Faculty of Music, Department of Ethnomusicology

Keywords: opera, post-opera, operatic, voice, body, singing machines

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the exhibition Post-opera, a complex and provocative curatorial project by Kris Dittel and Jelena Novak, in which the changeable relations between the voice and the (human) body are investigated from the creative and the theoretical perspectives, relying on juxtaposing and reflection between visual arts, technology and opera. Firstly, in the paper we examine the curatorial procedure, in its shift from the mediatory function between the work and the audience towards the practice, which intervenes in both of these domains and results in an exhibition as an autonomous art object. In the second part we interpret the politics and the effectiveness of the singing and the speaking voice in contemporary art and culture, while in the third part we write about the resemantization of the relation between the singing body and the sung voice within ‘installing the operatic’.

Author Biographies

Ivana Ilić, University of Arts in Belgrade, Faculty of Music, Department of Music Theory

Ivana Ilić, Ph.D., musicologist, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Music Theory of the Faculty of Music in Belgrade. Fields of research: history and epistemology of music theory and analysis, aspects of musical form, contemporary Serbian music, musical institutions, and cultural politics in Serbia.

Iva Nenić, University of Arts in Belgrade, Faculty of Music, Department of Ethnomusicology

Iva Nenić, Ph.D., ethnomusicologist and cultural theorist. She is employed as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Ethnomusicology of the Faculty of Music in Belgrade. As a lecturer she collaborates in postgraduate studies of the University of Arts in Belgrade (Theory of Arts and Media, Management in Culture).