AYUMI PAUL

Ayumi Paul lives and works between Athens and Kyoto. Her multidisciplinary practice spans sound, paper, installation, and textile works, approaching art as a ceremonial practice and listening as a relational force. Engaging with broad fields of scientific and historical research, she consistently returns to the body and its inherent ways of sensing and knowing.

Her long-term project The Singing Project (since 2019) investigates singing as a pre-linguistic human capacity and as a tool for collective attunement. Other works, including embroidered astronomical scores and salt-based drawings, trace relationships between bodies, landscapes, and time.

Rather than reflecting or projecting, Paul’s oeuvre proposes perspectives and languages anchored in the presence of each moment, continuously tracing the intricate web of interrelation that shapes human experience. In doing so, her work creates space for new stories to emerge.

Her work has been presented internationally at institutions including SFMOMA, Gropius Bau, National Gallery Singapore, Kunsthalle Osnabrück, and Sharjah Biennale 16. She was artist in residence at Villa Massimo in Rome in 2021.

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Sounding Our Senses

The artistic practice of Ayumi Paul actively attunes matter to reveal seemingly invisible or undetected connections and capacities. By focusing on the interplay of matter, rather than static expressions, she highlights the malleable nature of space-time and endeavours to fold, bend, stretch, and form this phenomenon as a central medium of her practice. Her body of work opens up new vocabularies, new lenses through which to communicate with the world around us. This is a practice of emergent language, which she proffers to her audiences to be taken up even beyond the immediate framework of her practice. Such generosity to enliven sensibilities marks her practice in all stages of presentation, from workshops to installations, musical performance, as well as works on paper.

Often attuning rhythms and patterns between seemingly disconnected stories and phenomena, Ayumi Paul develops ways to perceive synchronicities in the surrounding world. In a recent work, Paul asked nine other artists to document dreams, thoughts, and findings throughout a designated period of time. By aligning these chronologically, what surfaces is a fabric of connection and also a reminder that life is poetry and that we are able to tune into each other. Every aspect of attuning yields reciprocity and grants new means for recognition.

Ayumi Paul cultivates a way of awareness that forgoes the restriction of expectation, offering instead a widening of perception to not only take in but to be permeated with one’s surroundings. Sound, for instance, is a medium Paul hones for its immateriality, urging it to become visible and palpable through its interaction with other elements. To this effect, she builds out richly layered constellations, in the wake of which, what is sensed in proximity is evidenced through affect. Tuning into one aspect shifts the whole.

Paul’s work can be read up against contemporary art predecessors from Felix Gonzalez-Torres to score-based Fluxus artists, such as Alison Knowles, incorporating invitation and social contracts as well as giving-over the extension of their work to its unfolding conditions. While her The Singing Project may encompass singularities of Inszenierung (staging, or literally, feeling ones self into a scene), it also contains an extended invitation. Paul welcomes all participants in her workshops to initiate the work elsewhere at any given time in the (actually unforeseeable) future. Is this a matter of open-share art creation? Or is this action also, integrally, concept and material of her work, the very substance she explores and makes visible? There is a potentiality that is called in by the artist, which cannot be easily or readily defined by signage or set programming as it asks that viewers engage within realms of the creative role itself. 

On a planet forever changed by our global generational experiences, one might start to see and sense more than meets the eye. For example, what boundaries constitute overlapping existences and how the wake of one individual might harbour or extend their presence beyond their body’s physical habitation of space in the most present tense. It marks a shift in conceptualization of where one begins and ends. Might we apply these learnings to Paul’s work? If so, we might witness a space like Gropius Bau’s atrium as one that is occupied by and harbouring Paul’s The Singing Project both in the time slot of one of the artist’s new or full moon gatherings just as much as on days when there’s nothing visible to see, a work extending beyond a keyed duration capable of being experienced in its very anticipation or retrospection. As in quantum physics, the work, in this way, represents all that is in its being-here-ness and its signaled being-not-(yet)-here-ness. 

text written by

Cassandra Edlefsen Lasch, 2023