Magz Hall
Waves of Resistance (Radio art without borders)
Tonnta Friotaíochta (Ealaíne raidió gan teorainneacha)
Installation with 6 radios transmitting a looped sonic work. Vinyl, Crystal and Kitchen Table 2020.
Narrators: Máiréad Ní Chróinín & Alexandra Jueno
Universial radio receiving apparatus
Title: Radio receiver 1914 Credit: Verhandlungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Basel, 1914, page 155 Author: Hans Zickendraht
Magz Hall is a sound and radio artist who has exhibited at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, British Museum, Tate Britain, The Sainsbury Centre, Whitechapel Gallery, Barbican, V and A, Jerwood Visual Arts, MACBA Barcelona, Denmark, Italy, Germany, Norway, Morocco, Canada and the USA and broadcast internationally. Tree Radio at YSP was a finalist for British Composer Award in Sonic Art 2016 and Spiritual Radio was selected for the International Sound Art Prize. She took part in the Jerwood Open Forest Exhibition 2016 and the alt Barbican programme in 2017.
Magz heads artist group Radio Arts, having curated works for exhibition, broadcast, and led numerous hands on workshops with the public in arts spaces.
Much of her sound-based work is concerned with speculative futures of FM, inspired by 100 years of international radio art practice, drawing on her practice based PhD ‘Radio After Radio: Redefining radio art in light of new media technology through expanded practice’ at UAL. She was a founder of award winning London arts station Resonance FM. She is currently a full time senior lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University in the School of Creative Arts & Industries ( SCADI) UK.
The birth of Radio Alice in Italy in the 1970s and availability of affordable transmitters and equipment, opened up the radio medium to artists and to a nascent Free Radio movement in Europe. This conjunction of expanded artistic practices and technologically-facilitated media activism evolved into an emergent terrain of radio arts activity and led to the establishment of the artist radio stations and radio actions which broke conventional broadcasting boundaries in myriad ways: from Free Radio to the mini FM movement in Japan in the 1980s to artist station Radia at Banff Arts Center in Canada in the 1990s .
In 1988, Polish artist Wojciech Bruszewski and German artist Wolf Kahlen were granted an ongoing analogue radio license in Poland with which to transmit Bruszewski’s art radio project Radio Ruins of Art, intended as a ‘philosophical discourse on infinity’. The project was instigated by Bruszewski when he left Berlin to return to Poland which was under martial law in 1981 and where he was unable to leave or travel. However, it was eventually pulled off air after five years by commercial radio interests after the fall of the socialist government.
In the same period, Women’s Scéal Radio was a pirate station broadcasting from the kitchen table of activist and performance artist Margaretta D’Arcy in Galway, breaking government censorship to broadcast women’s voices from across the divide.
We are all kitchen table broadcasters with streams across the globe but for those without broadband, radio is a still a mighty force for many worldwide.
This radiophonic poem draws on radio’s rich history as a tool not only for propaganda but for artistic creation. The poem makes reference to my own enforced and growing isolation first through Brexit and then lockdown. In the spirit of transnationalism, it sends a broadcast from the phantom island of Hy-Brasil once mapped off the Irish coast, relaying a message of peace, hope and unity across all borders.