mikhail karikis & uriel orlow

Sounds From Beneath

"The publication Sounds from Beneath focuses on a project initiated by Mikhail Karikis, who invited visual artist Uriel Orlow to collaborate with him on a video which explores the sounds of coalmines and their memories among the disappearing community
of elderly coalminers in Britain. The book features a DVD with the short film Sounds from Beneath centering around a choral piece for which Karikis worked over a six-month period with an ex-miners' choir whom he asked to remember and sing the subterranean sounds they used to hear inside the coalmines. In the video, a desolate disused colliery in England, once populated with workers, engines and the sounds of their activities, transforms into an amphitheatre resonating noises of underground explosions, machines cutting the coal, shovels scratching the arth, and the melody of the Miner's Lament, all sung by Snowdown Colliery Welfare Male Voice Choir standing in formations reminiscent of the picket lines during the miner-strikes. Sounds from Beneath continues Karikis's exploration of the voice as a sculptural material and a tool to investigate the politics of marginalised communities, and connects with Orlow's interest in landscape as a site of memory and history. The book includes three essays by distinguished cultural theorist Steven Connor,
contemporary art curator Katerina Gregos, film theorist Lucy Reynolds, with a foreword by curator Sue Jones."