Cara Tolmie works from within the intersections of performance-making, installation, experimental music and the moving image. Her works have been performed and exhibited widely at art galleries, music festivals, biennials, conferences and in the public space. The practice at large centres itself upon the voice, the body and the complex ties between the two. All at once subjective as well as socially determined, she explores voice and body as two codependent entities able to confirm as well as contradict one another. Within this there is keen attention paid to the role of listening both as a practice witnessed by the onlooker and a relationship between the performer and audience member. In recent years, her performance, sound and video works have explored the notion of the ‘displaced vocal body’ and its potential to reassess practices of listening. Cara defines this ‘displaced vocal body’ as the use of performative, vocal and choreographic methods that seek to disturb the continuity between a voice and the body which produces that voice. In her solo works for example, she often explores performative techniques that renegotiate listening relations between ‘The Singer’ and her audience through live uses of the defamiliarised, uncanny and sampled singing voice. In what ways might the displaced vocal body explore a politics of listening? How might these re-organised approaches to listening encourage us to listen together through new value systems? Collaboration is also a key aspect of her ongoing practice. She has worked with artists Moa Franzen, Martin Gustavsson, Kim Coleman, Will Holder, France-List McGurn, Kimberley O’Neill, Patrick Staff, Corin Sworn; Choreographers Zoë Poluch, Robin Jonsson; Musicians Stine Janvin, Seymour Wright, Paul Abbott (in group ULAAPARC) and on artistic research project The Glossary of the Event with Frida Sandström and Aleksei Borisionok. She also conducts 'Gender of Sound', an ongoing project with Susanna Jablonski in which they host listening events that endeavour to listen together through the frame of ‘gender’ in order to find a shared language that can accommodate multiple testimonies of listening. They have also produced a series of ‘Listening Curtains’ as part of this collaboration. She has performed and exhibited widely at venues and festivals including Luleå Biennial, Lumen Projects, Borealis Festival, Moderna Museet, KW, Cafe OTO, Edition Festival, Camden Arts Centre, Lydgalleriet, Bonniers Konsthall, Counterflows Festival, Chisenhale Gallery, Spike Island, Outpost, Tramway, Tate Modern, Frieze Projects, Marres, South London Gallery and Block Universe Festival. Cara is currently a doctoral candidate in Critical Sonic Practice at Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm conducting artistic research project Listening to the Displaced Vocal Body. She is also part of the editorial collective for Cesura//Acesso journal and was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award 2016. Contact:
[email protected] 
