Sophie Mallett, Paradise Island
Saturday 28 January, 6pm.
Sophie Mallett is a London based artist. Her practice is concerned with forms of belonging and exclusion, and how these manifest through national borders, capital and migration. Through music, radio, video and installation she pursues a practice focused on sounds’ intersection with affect, politics and value, concentrating on the connections between sound, music, history and place.
Educated at London College of Communication, Open School East, and Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, Mallett’s practice is both interdisciplinary and collaborative, with a reflexive emphasis on how individuals work together.
Recent projects include: ‘Hypersea’, Turner Contemporary, Margate (2016); Artist-in-residence, [SPACE], London (2016); Horrid Little Hands, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2016); Liminal States, RCA, London, (2016); Project Radio, &Model, Leeds, (2015); Live ASMR, Resonance FM and Open School East, London, (2015); Sonic Blind Dates, Tate Britain, London, (2015).
Paradise Island is inspired by Hog Island, bought by an American tycoon and transformed in to a resort complex, for which he created a flag that he believed would be a beacon of peace. The resort is now named Atlantis. Found and recorded footage is combined to explore this site as a sunken territory in its own fictional documentary. Paradise Island is part of National Anthems, a developing body of work that repurposes and reimagines the national anthem for territories that don’t exist, have been forgotten, are virtual or for those to which we are denied access.
Well I’d like to tell you one thing,
I invented an insignia for Paradise Island,
it was in the form of a capital P, for paradise,
and then I finally decided it would be a great international symbol for peace,
and I brought it along because I really wanted to show it to the audience,
you know, just to see what they thought of it.
