Performance artist extraordinaire Irina Gheorghe interrogates the limitations of a potential human-alien exchange through the use of the performing voice, navigating the space between human and non-human resonances in extended anticipation of a never accomplished cosmic contact.
The work is part of the long term project Foreign Language for Beginners, exploring the history of attempted communication with extraterrestrial intelligence and the idea of an abstract, universal language that might enable such an exchange through performance, sound, drawing, and installation. The alien is a hypothetical figure, taking shape at the intersection of speculative fiction and scientific research; a being whose existence and form can only be presumed but of which there is no empirical evidence. As a result, any message aimed at such an entity must reconcile with the unresolved character of the process: the message might never reach its destination, it might arrive too late, or prove to be impossible to decipher.
The Day They Come interrogates the limitations of a potential human-alien exchange through the use of the performing voice, which navigates the space between human and nonhuman resonances without the support of additional, technologically produced sounds. The work inhabits the medium of radio transmission, a central tool for twentieth century attempts at interstellar communication, as a space of interruption, distortion and failure to connect. Expanded to the cosmic temporality of Earth’s rotation around its axis, the voice is faced with its own constraints. Discursive formulation turns to progressive decomposition, explicit assertion runs into fatigue and emphatic repetition veers from the clarifying to the absurd. The extended duration of the 22 hours of sound, stretching beyond the usual possibilities of a human body to encompass it, speaks to the extended anticipation of a never accomplished cosmic contact.
Irina Gheorghe works primarily with performance, in combination with installation, drawing, photography, or video, to address the tensions inherent in the attempts to speak about things beyond our possibilities of observation, from extraterrestrial life to hypothetical planets. Her work explores the notion of deviation as a technique of estranging the every day, abstraction as a language for interstellar communication, and the absurd as the mood of interaction with a world beyond perception. Irina also works as part of The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, where she confounded together with Alina Popa (1982-2019) to investigate how passions shape contemporary society, as well as our affective relationship to an unhuman universe. Since January 2019 she is also part of the Psychedelic Choir. Her work was shown at the Künstlerhaus Bremen, Zitadelle Spandau, Grazer Kunstverein, Ivan Gallery Bucharest, Project Arts Center Dublin, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Swimming Pool Sofia, Changing Room Berlin, Zona Sztuki Aktualnej Stettin, Centre for Contemporary Art Derry, Glasgow International, TRAFO Budapest, Pratt Manhattan Gallery New York, Times Museum Guangzhou, HOME Manchester, Salonul de Proiecte Bucharest, Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, BAK, Utrecht, DEPO Istanbul and Galeria Posibila Bucharest, among others.