Monday 23.04.2018, 14:00 / free workshop with Zsanett Szirmay // Details and registration >>

On view till 29.04, from Tuesday to Thursday 11am – 7pm, from Friday to Sunday 10am – 5pm.
The events are part of 27th Saint George Day’s.

Soundweaving by Zsanett Szirmay is an interactive and interdisciplinary project that transposes elements of vernacular embroidery into an installation. Besides being well-known visual elements, motifs and patterns of vernacular embroiderz serve as musical scores. At the core of the Soundweaving project is the traditional cross-stitching pattern used in Hungarian folk embroidery transformed into sound by a punch card comb music player. The cross-stitch pattern of holes on the tape in the musical box were punched by the creator, Zsanett Szirmay. In this case, the punched tape acts as the score. Embroidered shirts and pillows from the Transylvanian Bukovina, and from Kalotaszeg and Hungary serve as a basis for the patterns. As part of the transformation, embroidery patterns are turned into laser cut textile pieces, and cross-stitched patterns into melodies.

Soundweaving equally stimulates all senses and calls for interaction. The project uses multiple media and communicates on diverse planes, combining the borderlands of folk art, design and music. It belongs to the analogue and digital realms at the same time as handmade embroidery is translated into laser cut patterns. At the same time, the visual world is presented in audio, or rather the graphic aspect of music gets a role in developing the tunes. Experimenting the borderlands of contemporary art, the installation combines tradition and technology, visual and auditive.

For the first edition of the project – transforming cross-stitched embriodery into music – folk musician and composer Bálint Tárkány-Kovács was instrumental in the audio mapping and developing the tunes. Based on motifs of hand woven rugs from the Middle East as well as the architecture of the region, Soundweaving Middle East Edition was developed together with composer and jazz musician Dániel Vikukel.

Textile designer and arts teacher Zsanett Szirmay obtained an MA at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design’s Department of Textile Design in 2017. Since 2013 she is a member of the Society of Hungarian Electrography and a regular participant at the Society’s group exhibitions. She is a member of FISE – Studio of Young Designers Association. In 2015 she represented MOME at the Heimtextil fair in Frankfurt. In 2017 she participated at the Budapest Design Week’s Smart Design contest with an audible jacquard textile, a smart material that is still being developed. Soundweaving and Soundweaving Middle East has toured several innovative and postdigital design fairs and festivals in Europe as well as in the Middle East. It has been presented at the Vienna Design Week, One Design Week Plovdiv (Being Post Digital), Brain Bar Budapest Festival, Baku Carpet Conference ISAC, Dubai Design Week etc.. The project has been selected among the most progressive works at the Milan design festival.