PERFORMANCE EVENT （Presented as part of Red Salon 2026）

In Minor Keys: Collective Frequencies

James Hullick

Saturday 4 July | 3 – 4 pm

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday: 10 am – 5 pm

Artist Statement

The performance program of In Minor Keys: Collective Frequencies brings together James Hullick's Sonobots, Amplified Elephants, and Noise Scavengers in a shared exploration of sound, attention, improvisation, and collective creativity. 

Although each project operates through distinct artistic languages and methods, all three are united by a commitment to listening as an active, relational practice. Their performances emerge through experimentation, curiosity, repetition, and attentive response to materials, environments, and one another. Sound is approached not as spectacle or demonstration, but as a means of encounter and discovery. 

Together, these works invite audiences to enter quieter registers of experience. Hums, taps, vibrations, found sounds, unexpected resonances, and collective improvisations accumulate into rich sonic environments that reward patience and close attention. The performances encourage us to notice what is often overlooked and to appreciate the expressive potential of modest gestures and ordinary materials. 

In this sense, the performance program finds a natural home in the spirit of In Minor Keys. Koyo Kouoh's invitation to attend to "persistent signals" and "lower frequencies" might almost have been written with these works in mind. They resist acceleration, virtuosity, and grand declaration, instead proposing alternative ways of sensing, communicating, and being together. 

Together, these performances propose that sound can be a space of shared imagination rather than individual display — one that asks audiences to slow down, listen closely, and remain open to what accumulates quietly at the edges of attention.

James Hullick The Sonobots: Whirling Dervishes and Tiny Tappers

For In Minor Keys: Collective Frequencies, James Hullick brings his Sonobots — experimental sound machines that create sonic environments through spinning objects, small percussive mechanisms, and found materials. 

Since 2007, Hullick has developed the Sonobots as instruments that deliberately embrace limitation. Their modest vocabulary of movements and sounds invites forms of listening that are attentive rather than spectacular. Small gestures, repetitions, hums, taps, and resonances accumulate into intricate sonic experiences that ask audiences to slow down and notice subtle relationships between sound, material, movement, and space. 

Rather than seeking orchestral grandeur or technical virtuosity, the Sonobots inhabit quieter registers. They foreground improvisation, curiosity, and the poetry of seemingly ordinary objects. Sound emerges through acts of care, experimentation, and patient attention. 

The Sonobots find a natural home in the spirit of In Minor Keys. Koyo Kouoh's invitation to attend to "persistent signals" and "lower frequencies" might almost have been written with Hullick's machines in mind — objects that tune audiences into subtle vibrations and overlooked resonances, asking us to listen closely to what might otherwise pass unnoticed. 

The Sonobots remind us that complexity often lives within simplicity, and that meaning frequently arrives through accumulation rather than declaration. Their sonic worlds are encountered through close listening — worlds that reward patience, invite curiosity, and gently resist summary.

Text by Dr Melentie Pandilovski