Tom Tlalim
Resounding Conflicts: Sound, body, space and data in artistic representations of political conflict
My thesis explores art that deal with political conflict through sound. I am interested in how artists have taken part in the framing of political events by subverting the authorship in their intervention.
Artists have participated in the framing of political events by collecting and appropriating documentary materials in manners that converse with ethnography. But the reflexive-observatory position which is reserved for researchers is often transgressed, as art works become participatory authorship, or a projective form of auto-ethnography. In the wake of processes of mediatisation in politics and war, these co-authored accounts become comparable to actual political campaigns. By this action, politics may be influenced by qualitative artistic intervention. My PhD analyses cases of artistic appropriation of 'real' events around the conflict of Israel / Palestine, where affective experience is prioritised, and asks the question whether conflict can be researched in-and-through art?
This is a practice-based project, of which critical questions also emerge about the combination of theory and practice at a PhD level. My artwork deals with conflict, urbanism, spatiality, motion and digital data. I am currently developing a new sound installation with filmographic elements which will be realised in 2011/12.
The project is co-supervised by Dr Kay Dickinson at Media and Communications, and by Dr Suhail Malik, Reader in Critical Studies, and Course Leader in Art Practice Critical Studies at the Art department. In 2010/11 I was supervised by Dr Julian Henriques. My work is also informed by visiting various groups at Goldsmiths, particularly the Research Architecture Round Table group, headed by Eyal Weizman.
Biography
Tom Tlalim is an artist and composer who develops conceptual environments that manifest in text, sound art, performance, or installation. His language is often abstract and focuses on kinetics and movement, but is informed by a central interest in data and patterns, especially those of spontaneous behaviour within rational constraints, or the temporal relations between movement, space and memory, and how these influence human social interactions and conflicts.
After starting his career as a guitarist/songwriter in punk bands around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem’s underground scene, Tlalim developed a career as a film composer and artist. In 2000 he moved to The Netherlands where his artistic language evolved from composition, through sound through art to generative new media installations and research-based conceptual work. His work was presented internationally at art manifestations such as at the 90 years Bauhaus in Weimar, the 11th Venice Architecture Biennial, Transmediale, DEAF, Stroom Center for Visual Art, TodaysArt, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Gaudeamus music week, the 3rd international Deleuze Conference. His work has also appeared in various articles and publications.
Tlalim’s work is supported by art institutions including Stroom, The Hague, The Ministry of Culture, The Lottery Art Fund, AFK and The Fund for Visual Art, Design and Architecture. He has just completed work on an abstract documentary film in collaboration with Martijn van Boven.
His PhD position is funded by the Dutch Fund for Visual Art, Design and Architecture. http://www.fondsbkvb.nl/
web
http://www.tomtlalim.com
http://www.concerningime.org