Bonnie Han Jones has created a work inspired by the tradition of Korean pansori—a musical genre incorporating song, story, and gesture—and the sonic ritual practices of female Korean shamans (mudang).

a place where many people gather (soundings) is a quadraphonic performance that considers how sound, heard in shared listening spaces, transforms listeners' relationships to history, to each other, and to place. Jones draws on archival recordings and works with circuit-bent instruments, transducers, inductors, metal, glass, and voice.

Pansori is a compound of the Korean words pan 판 and sori 소리, the latter meaning "sound." Pan is thought to refer either to a song with many tones or to a situation where many people gather, reflecting the format of the pansori performance, which usually lasted three to eight hours and took place in public, communal spaces. The pansori singer is an oral historian, carrying the past into the present.

Bonnie Han Jones (b. 1977) is a Korean American improvising musician, poet, and educator working primarily with electronic sound and text. Her work is iterative and multidisciplinary, and typically involves building concepts through research and study and then moving these ideas through a variety of mediums, methods, and forms. She uses electronic music, recorded sound materials, text, video, performance, and score, with attention to listening and improvisation as a core theme and generative method. The work broadly explores noise, sonic identity, listening as thinking, and sound as knowledge.

Jones performs both solo and in a wide range of collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. She was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and has been a board member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, she cofounded TECHNE with Suzanne Thorpe, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops focused on technology-based artmaking, improvisation, and community collaboration.

Jones has received commissions from the ICA, London, and the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, and has presented her work throughout the United States, Mexico, Europe, and Asia. She was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in South Korea, Jones was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, spent years in Baltimore and Providence, and is currently based in Chicago.

Jones last performed for Lampo in December 2022 and is a contributing artist to the Lampo Folio.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound, and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Accessibility: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Note: Registration for Lampo programs is required, but does not guarantee entry. Capacity for this performance is limited. Doors open 30 minutes prior to the performance and seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis for those registered in advance. Reservations expire 5 minutes before the performance start time, at which point seating will be released to the waitlist. Due to the popularity of the Lampo programs, performances quickly reach capacity. No late seating will be permitted.

Photo: Chris Grady