The Ballona/Waachnga Project | A 24 hour installation by artists Halina Kliem & Daniel Rothman

The Ballona/Waachnga Project
A 24 hour installation by artists Halina Kliem & Daniel Rothman
Presented as part of the 2022 The Fulcrum Festival: Deep Ocean/Deep Space

Midnight to Midnight, Thursday, September 22, 2022 from 00:00 to 23:59

18th Street Arts Center (Airport Campus) | Kitchen Lab
3026 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica CA 90405

The Ballona/Waachnga Project is a long durational, multistage work that, through a variety of media, brings together the fantasy and science of the Ballona Wetlands, Los Angeles’s last remaining wetland. For Fulcrum Festival, it is a meditation based on the soundscape of twenty-four continuous hours—midnight to midnight—juxtaposed with asynchronous visuals over a season of drought. It is installed in 18th Street Arts Center’s Kitchen Lab, a place of domesticated chemistry, where the sound and images of the freshwater marsh contrast with the corrugated steel hangar, reminding us that the Ballona Wetland was the site of Howard Hughes’s H4-Hercules plane (his Spruce Goose). The greater project will evolve over time as the recorded soundscape and visual imagery grow. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Halina Kliem is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in the divided city of Berlin. She uses a combination of media, which often includes video, film, photography, and the written word to investigate variations and gaps that occur within language and communication. She has always been interested in non-human entities, various wildlife species, and the space between science and alternate bodies of knowledge. Her time- based media installations were featured at MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (US), Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany), Victoria and Albert Museum, London (UK), Lentos Museum of Modern Art, Linz (Austria), Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (Germany), the Brooklyn Film Festival (US), Florida Film Festival (US), London Short Film Festival (UK), and Pace Gallery, NYC (US). She studied experimental film, photography, and sound at Carnegie Mellon College of Fine Arts in Pittsburgh (US) and holds a Master of Fine Arts and Visual Culture Studies from Berlin University of the Arts in Germany. Halina lives in Los Angeles.

Daniel Rothman is a Los Angeles-based composer and sound installation artist whose work is performed and installed at leading international venues, including LACMA and Zentrum für Kunstund MedienTechnologie (Karlsruhe). He founded Wires Center for New & Experimental Music in Los Angeles in 1991, and Los Angeles River Records a decade later. At CalArts he taught music composition and courses for the Dept. of Critical Studies, and was a visiting composer at Brooklyn College Computer Music Center, Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, Darmstadt Internationales Musikinstitut, IEM-Graz, Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (Paris), Dansk Institut fur Elektroakustiche Musik (Århus) and Experimentalstudio des Südwestrundfunks (Freiburg). Awards include NEA, Rockefeller Foundation, and French Ministry of Culture, and his music is available on the Albany, DaCapo, Éditions QB, New World, Los Angeles River, and Zeitklang record labels.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Ballona/Waachnga Project very sincerely acknowledges assistance in its many forms from Ballona Wetland Conservancy, Jim Burton and EcoKai, Fabian Harb (Dinamo), Institute for Jewish Creativity (AJU), Karina Johnston (Bay Foundation), Paul Kliem, Robert Adee Koch (Cornell Ornithology Lab), Andrea Loselle, Frank Masi & Brent Imai, Dr. Margaret O’Brien (Environmental Data Initiative), Sagi Rafael (IJC), Dr. Edith Read (Ballona freshwater marsh), Dr. Shelley Stall (American Geophysical Union), Dr. Michael Stocker (Ocean Conservation Research), Lynn Warshafsky (Venice Arts), and 18th Street Art Center.