Sovereign Air Screening and Live Performance
8pm Saturday 31.10.26
Ben Denham will screen and discuss his work Sovereign Air(2026) and perform with a custom synthesizer system.
Sovereign Air (2026) is an essay and audio-visual work of electronic and dialectical synthesis. It was commissioned by Ben Byrne for the Avantwhatever platform.
https://avantwhatever.com/
The work comes out of the practice of atmospheric listening; a multi-sensory activity that includes an awareness of the air and its touch on skin, environmental sound, and audible analogues of air pressure changes produced in a synthesizer system.
Sovereign Air AV, (single channel video stereo sound) includes video, audio, air pressure, and spectrogram recordings from three locations in Goolay'yari (the place of the pelican dreaming, another name for the so-called cooks river).
The work is grounded in material analysis of fossil fuel infrastructure, bushcare activities, and the broader ecological community of the Goolay'yari river valley. It considers how this locale is part of an imperial supply chain that links Australia to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and wars waged by the US-Israeli alliance in countries across West-Asia.
Ben Denham is an artist living and working on Gadigal, Kamaygal, Wangal, and Bidgigal land. He builds instruments and machines as part of a transmedia practice that includes the weather, drawing, electronics, kinetic sculpture, text, video and sound. He makes custom synthesizer modules that form part of larger installations and systems that transduce, reflect, or abstract more complex phenomena that exist in the world.