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Dale Berning
11/09

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Dale Berning is a performance and sound artist of French and South-African origins who lives and works in London. Besides performances and sound installations she also draws, and creates soundtracks for films. During Berning’s musical performances she moves through the performance space creating different kinds of sound using her voice and implements she’s converted, conventional instruments, and various objects.

Berning has recorded two albums so far, Horse Stories in 2006, and The Horse and Camel Stories in 2007. She also holds live performances with Cello player Ute Kanngiesser, under the name Loup. She performs and shows her work in England, France and Japan, with other sound artists including Jez, Nishikawa Bunsho, Sanso-Xtro, Tetsuya Umeda (who stayed at the JCVA in 2007), and more. Music from her albums is also featured in the work of Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa, who stayed at the JCVA in 2004.
Berning was the JCVA’s guest in November 2009. She opened her stay in Israel in Jerusalem, and spent ten days working in the Jerusalem Print Workshops, where she made drawings and prints of objects she later used at the CCA performance. In the second part of her stay, she moved to Tel Aviv, where she completed her preparations, and opened the Biennale.
Quodlibet for lightbulb and bollenhut (Shuk Ha'Carmel)

This performance was the opening work for Blurr 7, the international biennale for performance art held in November 2009 at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv. Berning began the performance wearing a dress lined with bells which was designed especially for the event, and then walking among the audience ringing a large bell. As she did so, she followed the chimes with a soft changeable hum and created a delicate symbiotic interweaving between the chimes and her voice. Moving through the audience with a trail of sound behind her, Berning’s effect was meditative and soft.

The quodlibet - a term for a humorous composition that harmonically weaves together two or more independent, familiar melodies - involved ping pong balls, light bulbs, marbles and other objects bought at the local market. Among its many sources of inspiration, Berning counts the Electronic Dress made of light bulbs by Japanese artist Tanaka Atsuko in 1956 and worn by her on various occasions, as well as Jeff Wall’s After the Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, 2000. This acclaimed, large-scale photograph features a low ceiling packed with hundreds of lights. Berning’s text referring to the latter, which she read at the end of her performance, says: “If I could shake that light-bulb room, it might just sound like heaven. It might just rain with an everlasting song…” The work searches for the sound that would resonate with and give a living voice to these iconic, but silent, art-world creations; it is particularly interested in the possibly theological task of translating light.