Superficial Songs is the second in our series of live performances in the Adam Art Gallery, alongside Kate Newby’s exhibition, YES TOMORROW. Antonia Barnett-McIntosh, 2018–19 Te Koki New Zealand School of Music composer-in-residence, will perform a new work, I got to write a song and you got to be in it, and present A Superficial Way, a video work created collaboratively with Emma Bennett.

Antonia is a composer-performer, sound artist, freelance editor and curator with an interest in working across disciplines, particularly with speech and language. Her performances embrace slippage and forced failure, improvisation, and the live space. Her works with words investigate speech as music: the pitches, rhythms and conversational overlaps of our everyday.

Antonia collaborates extensively with musicians, theatre and filmmakers, dancers, visual artists and poets. Through experiences with the process of collaboration, she devises moments of tension, surprise, and also humour, to create communal experiences whereby spectators are welcomed as participants in a compositional process. This implies that listening in itself is active: audience members are not mere recipients of music as finished form, but drawn into a piece’s compositional questions where listening and spectating can be viewed as a form of composition.