Tanya Gayer is Soundwave’s Chief Curator, having joined the Festival to curate SonicLabs ((8)) and Soundwave ((8)): Infrastructure. For the culmination of her two-year term, Tanya continues her inclusive curatorial practice, assembling a multidisciplinary lineup of guest curators working in theater, dance, film, community building, social practice, and music to produce events that investigate sound and its relationship to time.
“While essential, the inherent acceptance of time creates both cultural, artistic, and biological limitations,” Gayer states. “An artistic exploration of time opens up a consideration of movement and duration, of soundwaves traveling over distances, of bodies moving in rhythm across the globe.” Throughout, audiences can explore the process of hearing, the possibility of slowing down time, the power of time as an organizing principle of life, and to consider the normative roles that time has constructed around us.
Tanya Gayer is a curator and writer based in Oakland, CA. Her curatorial projects and research examine history-making institutions such as archives, databases, governmental assimilation efforts, and algorithmic categorizations to realize the effects such processes have in forming identity and culture. Gayer received her dual masters degree in Curatorial Practice and Visual + Critical Studies from California College of the Arts and her BFA from University of Nevada, Reno.
Her curatorial projects have been exhibited at Root Division, San Francisco, CA; Hubbell Street Galleries, San Francisco, CA; Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, CA; The Internet Archive, San Francisco, CA; Gray Area, San Francisco, CA; CTRL + SHFT Gallery, Oakland, CA; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA; Pro Arts Gallery, Oakland, CA; Adobe Books Backroom Gallery, San Francisco, CA; among others. She has been in residence at Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; Picture Berlin in Germany; and Signal Culture in Owego, NY. Her writing has been published in Daily Serving, in exhibition catalogs associated with CULT Exhibitions, San Francisco, CA; Holland Project, Reno, NV; Pro Arts, Oakland, CA; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA. Gayer has lectured at UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, California College of the Arts, and at the CODAME Art + Tech Festival #ARTOBOT. Currently, she is the Exhibitions Assistant at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Chief Curator for Soundwave 9.
