For the inaugural Sound Art Brighton Festival we are delighted to present this co-commissioned exhibition by artist Sanja Matkovic.

This exhibition was selected from an open call for proposals that explore how people can experience sound art through senses other than auditory such as sight, touch and smell – making it more accessible to audiences who are d/Deaf and hard of hearing, neurodiverse or with disabilities etc.

About the exhibition

Sanja says: “For this project I wanted to explore the idea of stolen childhoods, a place where unrealised dreams are stored. As a child from a broken family living in Slovenia, a country that never felt like my own, I felt as if I were deprived of the basic joys that every child should experience. To escape the hurt, I used to daydream. Every day I invented virtual landscapes full of soft shapes and colour, accompanied by comforting sounds.

Stolen Childhoods intends to share these dreams through an installation of sound, space and photographic images – brought to life by a visitor’s touch.  A colourful, tactile object, embedded with touch sensors, placed in the centre of the installation space, triggers some of the sounds of train trips, beach picnics, city walks, hugs, family celebrations, home; welcoming and playful moments I missed as a child. The installation will wrap the visitor in dream-like landscapes of childhood playfulness and a safe hug of life.”

About the artist

Sanja says: “I was born in Bosnia and moved to Slovenia when I was 3 years old. In 1991 Slovenia voted to leave the Yugoslav federation and war followed. I was 15. The war didn’t affect me directly but it had a huge impact on my sense of belonging and identity. In 2016 I moved to Brighton and for some peculiar reason felt at home there straight away. My love for creating digital art stories comes from my other passion – electronic music. Through the process of making patterns and layers out of digital photos, I found a way to merge and shape these sound pieces into new, poetic, visual stories. By combining images with poetry, layers with loops, and pixels with beats I created a series of digital art prints, with the aim of blurring the lines between fine art and art photography.

The call out from Sound Art Brighton and ONCA give me the opportunity to combine my art practice with sound.”

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About Sound Art Brighton

Sound Art Brighton is an independent initiative that celebrates the presence of sound art in Brighton, UK. Building on the wide interest this art form has attracted in the city, we promote the diversity of sound in its intrinsic relations with other arts and the everyday. We reach out to all practitioners and facilitators engaged in this hybrid art form and who contribute in their sonic ways to Brighton’s urban environment and communal life. Our activities include city-wide events, a partner network, an interactive website and research projects.

Sound Art Brighton Festival is a city-wide programme of events presenting sound installations, sound sculptures, interactive sound events, performances, sound walks, audio and audiovisual works, both in galleries and outdoors, throughout the city of Brighton and Hove (UK). Combining local sound art talents with international guests, the festival celebrates the diversity and range of this broad and hybrid art practice and pays homage to the multitude of sounds to be found in our city – with the Downs on one side and the sea on the other, as part of a UNESCO biosphere.

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OPENING TIMES

Wednesday: 1 – 6pm
Thursday: 1 – 6pm
Friday: 1 – 6pm
Saturday: 1 – 4pm

**Please note we will only be open 4 – 6pm on Thursday 10 March for the exhibition launch**

COVID SAFETY MEASURES

Please note we currently have the following Covid safety measures in place:

• Face masks are encouraged, unless exempt
• Capacity limited to 20 people at any one time
• If you are experiencing Covid symptoms or have tested positive in the last 7 days we kindly ask you not to visit the gallery to keep our staff and the public safe

Thank you for your understanding.

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This exhibition has been made possible thanks to the generous support of The Chalk Cliff Trust.

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Image credit: artwork by Sanja Matkovic

Image description: a colourful digital artwork that could be read as an abstract landscape. On a pale blue background a composition of bright blues, greens and reds appears to hover, suspended in space. What look like brush strokes, swirls of paint or inks mix and morph in and out of each other. Towards the edge of the composition on the left and right balloon shapes are visible.