Cold Protein ColdProtein

Year: 2018
Location: The British Museum, London
Directions: this piece takes you on a circular walk through the British Museum, London. You may wish to copy the route (see below) on a map of the museum prior to starting the podcast, then follow it as you listen. Ghost Writer sets an ambiance not connected with any particular object, so feel free to walk at any pace you desire.
Duration: 18 min

Route: start at the bottom of the main steps of the British Museum’s Great Russell Street entrance, just past security. After walking up the steps, turn left immediately after entering the building, walking past the cloakroom and the small shop, then turn right: you should find yourself at the beginning of the Ancient Egypt gallery facing two seated statues [Room 4 on the Museum’s map]. Walk to the end of this room, feel free to wander round the exhibits; you will meet the West stairs on your left at the end of the room. Climb the stairs to the upper floor. At the top of the stairs take a left to enter the second Ancient Egypt gallery [Room 61] and explore the rooms of Egyptian life, death and afterlife [Rooms 62-63]. Continue to the end of the gallery until you have to turn right. From here we recommend proceeding straight past the stairs to the end of each gallery, from Ancient Middle East [Room 52], then right into Medieval Europe [Room 40], until you reach the South Stairs, which will lead you back down to the main entrance.

This commission developed out of a dialogue with Mohamed Elshahed, former Curator of Modern Egypt at the British Museum, London, who helped build the XX century Egyptian material culture collection to sit alongside those of Ancient Egypt. Artist Malak Helmy’s sound work for these spaces evokes the first Cairene suburb Heliopolis from the early XX century – Egypt’s first suburban development and laboratory of Egyptian High-Modernism. Within the dystopia typical of suburbs, a rather significant Egyptian Death Metal scene emerged in the 1990s. Connected to the ancient world, the genre was deeply entwined with modernist urban landscapes: vacant desert lots, wide boulevards, empty cemeteries, and the Hindu-temple-inspired Baron Empain Palace, completed in 1911 as the residence of the Belgian founder of Heliopolis.

For Ghost Writer, Helmy takes a passage from China Miéville’s novel Kraken (2010), in which a character called Wati – a shabti like the funerary figures in the British Museum’s Egyptian collection – rebels in the afterlife and marches forward into the present, into London’s ‘underworld’, to start an insurrection amongst sculptures and magicked slaves. Helmy closely collaborated with Egyptian Death Metal audio/visual artist Nader Sadek to interpret Miéville’s passage as a Death Metal/doom-inspired track, accompanying a journey through the museum’s rooms.

Credits:
Words: China Miéville, from “Chapter 25”, Kraken (2010)
Vocals: Nader Sadek, Malak Helmy
Musical compositions, guitar: Nader Sadek
Guitar: Nader Sadek
Arrangement, production, recording: Malak Helmy
Mixing and additional editing: Jim Ross
Studio Recording: Hashem El Saifi (Epic 101)
Thanks to Mohamed Elshahed

Malak Helmy works across a variety of media. She has made several projects that are studies of a character, sometimes using her own voice, often that of friends, who can become the muses or protagonists of these pieces.

Disclaimer: Please be aware that Cold Protein is not responsible for and does not guarantee your entrance to the locations. Access is at the discretion of each individual site, and subject to their opening hours, T&C and ticketing (if applicable).

Year: 2018
Location: Covent Garden Tube Station, London
Directions: Start at the entrance of Covent Garden Tube Station and continue your travels by Underground for the duration of the piece
Duration: 31 min

A Sojourn Through Saturn and Across the Southern Sea by Zadie Xa combines spoken-word narration with traditional Korean percussions and abstract compositions to create an otherworldly soundscape to be experienced on London’s Underground. Starting at the top of Covent Garden Tube Station stairwell, the piece accompanies our descent and travel into the subterranean environment. As we enter the underground tunnels, a journey through time and memory begins.

The work is inspired by one of the trips Xa takes most frequently in London – that to her studio in Bromley by Bow on the Central Line. The hot temperature and harsh noises of the tube evoke an imagery of banshees and ghosts in the artist’s imagination, echoed in the work by ghostly wails and hisses. A Sojourn Through Saturn and Across the Southern Sea also includes excerpts from shaman songs and percussionist rhythms, acting as a supernatural force giving motion to the journey.

Credits:
Words by Zadie Xa including excerpts from ‘Fish Scales’ by Taylor Le Melle
Musical contributions from Jihye Kim
feat. ‘vILLIANs tHEMe’, produced by Siege the Beat Bully

Zadie Xa is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans across painting, sculpture, textile, video, sound and performance. Her work explores and interrogates the spaces created through the overlapping and conflation of cultures that inform notions of self and hybridity. Xa frequently references personal experiences as a subject within the Asian diaspora, creating new and alternative Asian identity narratives often fantastical and within the realm of the supernatural.

Disclaimer: Please be aware that Cold Protein is not responsible for and does not guarantee your entrance to the locations. Access is at the discretion of each individual site, and subject to their opening hours, T&C and ticketing (if applicable).

Year: 2018
Location: Toilets of McDonald’s at 48 Leicester Square, London
Duration: 19 min
Please note this work contains strong language.

An intimate, culinary, eschatological slice of memoir, told to you as if you should remember it – an emergence from the psychedelia that precedes abandon and follows loss. Narrated in the artist’s own voice, flat meat cake pulsates with greed, and grief, and the obsessive precision of the genius and the insane.

Voice: Ed Atkins

Ed Atkins is an artist who makes videos, writes and draws, developing a complex and deeply figured discourse around definition, wherein the impossibilities for sufficient representations of the physical, specifically corporeal, world — from computer generated imagery to bathetic poetry — are hysterically rehearsed. Solo presentations include Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; MMK Frankfurt; DHC/ART, Montréal (all 2017); Castello di Rivoli, Turin; The Kitchen, New York (both 2016); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015) and The Serpentine Gallery, London (2014). An anthology of his texts, “A Primer for Cadavers”, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2016, and an extensive artist’s monograph from Skira was published in 2017. Atkins lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen.

Disclaimer: Please be aware that Cold Protein is not responsible for and does not guarantee your entrance to the locations. Access is at the discretion of each individual site, and subject to their opening hours, T&C and ticketing (if applicable).