The international performance festival PhonoFemme was launched in Vienna in 2009 and developed by Mia Zabelka, composer, e-violinist and performance artist, as a platform for intermedial performance art with a particular awareness of the marginalization of women in the artworld.

2011 will see a re-launch of the festival in co-operation with the long-standing contemporary music festival Wien Modern and the Brunnenpassage. Following a 3-way exchange in 2009 between artists from Austria, the USA and Croatia, this year’s PhonoFemme is a curatorial „sonic mirror“ between Vienna and London, involving international artists from Austria and the UK but also from Finland, Norway, Japan, and Pakistan. Mia Zabelka, together with Zahra Mani, will present excerpts from the first edition of PhonoFemme and explain some of the ideas and motivations involved in developing and continuing the festival.

Rie Nakajima is an artist from Yokohama who works in London. She uses sounds, objects, and images as materials, with which she creates installations, performances, recordings, and composition. Her approaches to the materials are minimal and simple as they are already complex enough in her idea, therefore the work is a lot about the process of reduction.

She will create a piece at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London.

Within Rie Nakajima’s space, Zahra Mani will perform live, developing a sonic performance that emerges out of the sonic and spatial surroundings, presenting a musical language comprising recordings from the musician’s archive of field recordings and bass resonances.

Mia Zabelka will join Zahra Mani in her piece, expanding the scope from the intimate space, through nature and rumbling earthiness with the further vibratory resonances of her voice and electric violin.