Anna Piva (aka Suhab) is a London-based composer, musician and multidisciplinary artist. She is a founding member, with Edward George and Trevor Mathison, of the arts collective Flow Motion and the electronic music group Hallucinator (Chain Reaction, Burial Mix), and is part of various improvised music ensembles. Piva works with sound, photography, video, text, chalk and found materials, and creates electro-acoustic soundscapes, audio art environments, radio art and multimedia installations.
Her arts practice explores the temporal dimensions of media, the transformation of scientific data and archival materials, music, migration and sound archaeologies, and the body, memory and perception. Her sonic architectures encompass field recordings, polyrhythms, synthesized sounds, sonified astronomical data, musical improvisations, poetry and spoken word, eroded, layered and arranged as stereo recordings and site-specific multi-speaker installations. Piva uses similar compositional approaches and dub processes to construct audiovisual montages and mix media installations, using digitally treated original and archival photography, video, chalk drawings and found objects.
Piva’s collaborative installations, audio art, performance presentations and web-based projects with Flow Motion have been exhibited and performed internationally – at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, the Pompidou Centre, the International Institute for Visual Arts, Tate Modern, FACT, the Science Museum Dana Centre, Camera Austria, SETI headquarters and Star City’s historic Cosmonaut’s Club in Russia. She has facilitated creative workshops on sound, the sciences and the social, on data transformation, on digital art and critical theory, on deep listening and mind ecology, on music and migration, and on soundscape and cinema in various universities and art colleges, including Westminster University Media & Art Department, UEL Refugee Research Centre, Cambridge Institute of Astronomy, Jodrell Bank and Merz Akademy in Stuttgart.
Her collaborative writing has been published in Leonardo, The Journal of Media Practice, Anomalie Digital, Changing States: Art & Ideas in an Era of Globalisation, Sonic Process, De-westernizing Film Theory (Routledge), and Blackwell’ s Encyclopaedia of Global Human Migration (Wiley Blackwell). Her PhD theses, Landscapes of the Invisible: Sounds, Cosmologies and Poetica of Space is available online.
Between 1987-1999 Piva performed, toured and recorded with various artists and musical groups (on bass, synth and electronics), including Tricky, PJ Harvey, Michael Rose, Black Radio, Love Isaacs, The Creatures, Gareth Sager & Steve Noble, and with many London-based improvised jazz, r&b and reggae ensembles. In the mid 1990s she built her home studio to explore new possibilities across electronic music, improvisation, dub and digital art. In 1999 she began a radioastronomy sound research and subsequently developed, in collaboration with Dr Tim O’Brien at Jodrell Bank, new X-ray data sonification tools and multiple approaches to data transformation. Her compositions and dubs based on sonified data formed the basis for Flow Motion’s art series Music & Science Lovers, which includes the projects Astro Black Morphologies/Astro Dub Morphologies (2004), Invisible (2007) and Explorations in Eleven Dimensions (2011).
Piva’s recent works include the EUS funded research and two-part multimedia art project Common Ground (2021-23) and the audio art installation Spirits of the Mine (2023), first exhibited at the 4th Industrial Art Biennial in Istria (May-July 2023); soundscape improvisations at the Poetry for Grenfell live performances and online events with Kamitan Arts (London, 2020-23); the 12 episodes radio series Morphologies with Edward George (2018-19), and her current radio series Altertimes at SOAS Radio (2023). She occasionally deejays, and regularly plays with percussions groups at the Village’s weekly sessions in Ladbroke Grove.
https://iniva.org/library/digital-archive/people/p/piva-anna/ https://iniva.org/library/digital-archive/people/f/flow-motion/ https://www.discogs.com/artist/1092-Hallucinator
For enquiries contact Anna Piva: here