M HKA Ensembles

Installation

Collection: Deimantas Narkevičius, gb agency Paris, Maureen Paley London.

The work A Tang of Lomo Film by Deimantas Narkevičius is the sound system for playing the programme. It uses a pair of speakers created for a cinema in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1964, created at the Soviet Union’s Lomo Kinap factory, which had moved to Uzbekistan from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) during the Second World War. Known for their technical sophistication, precision and warmth of sound, the sound technologies produced by the factory had been used in spaces including cinemas and workers’ clubs across the Soviet Union. Their particular sonic qualities are intimately 59 tied to their use as instruments – both literally and metaphorically – of sounding the ideological voice. Yet the fact of their making in the space of Soviet Uzbekistan – a nationalised former imperial territory – simultaneously marks the speakers as objects that are part of a history that exists in dialogue with the sounds they play. The project considers how such sonic narratives and histories reverberate through this technology, navigating a space with, between, alongside and across the dominant voice.