As it rises into the air: Listening in Practice / MMB
published in Art India Vol. 23 / Issue 3
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Hear, Hear
From the expressions of labourers to the scripts of queer phone conversations, a group show brings together diverse marginalised voices. Anuj Daga listens carefully.
At the outset, the curatorial endeavour of the show As it rises into the air: Listening in Practice from the 21st of August to the 5th of October at the Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, seemed like a rehearsal in the reverse-invocation of Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, where Spivak raises questions on the ways in which we investigate another culture and the ethics of interpreting and representing the other. Curated by Berlin-based Juana Awad and Mumbai-based Zeenat Nagree, the exhibition brings together 13 international and Indian artists whose works refer to various kinds of marginality like colour, class, caste and sexuality. Several artistic practitioners have engaged with under-represented and marginal voices as material for art over the last two decades. In their gentle repositioning of the project within the domain of the listened rather than the spoken, the curators of the present show hoped to invite reflection on the practice of representation wherein the critical gaze is turned to the observer, rather than the observed.
Mumbai-based artist Amol Patil presents archival audio clips of his father’s play who was a mill worker by day and a playwright by night. By methods of superimposition, re-recording and editing the voices on measured lengths of the magnetic audio tape, also originally used by his father, Patil produces a sound that seems to index the environment of labour, as well as the intimation of its theatrical experiments. This work is complimented by Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang whose adjacently placed film Music While We Work documents along with the help of its workers, the sounds of sugar factory in her hometown Huwei. Wang principally stages sound as the collective memory of the labour force’s most significant experience in these closed down factories. Through these installations, both projects push the observer to listen to the experience of class as much as the post-productive quotidian lives of the mill-workers – one imagined in the play-scripts and the other compulsively remembered as music.
Sandeep Kuriakose’s Woh bhi line ka tha transcribes queer phone conversations into an uninterrupted singular script printed on a legal paper, left to be picked up and read by the viewer. The work coaxes the reader to be a voyeuristic listener although privileges the English reader in its decision to transcribe Hindi conversations (along with the English) into the Latin alphabet. Natasha A. Kelly from Germany and Karan Shrestha from India/Nepal sensitize us to the documentary voice of the emotionally or physically suppressed that we customarily attend to in ethnographic histories. Kelly draws our attention to the verbalized experiences of people of colour in Germany whereas Shrestha records the voices of the displaced from the Chitwan National Park in Nepal. In hearing these two works, one wonders if the artist also becomes the mediator of catharsis in one’s role as a patient listener.
Noise composer Raven Chacon’s sound installation remains the most riveting inclusion. Scores of music laid out on standees set a ghost-like stage for a concert that one witnesses on a screen. A disciplined row of gun-shooters fire bullets to the meters and scales of the composition. Although hearing the sonic gunshots on screen dampens the potential experience of the live performance, one can only imagine the lyrical brutality of listening to Chacon’s work in person, simultaneously inversing the notion of both firing and music. Chacon’s work fundamentally and poignantly addresses the questions raised in the curators’ schema. It ‘attacks’ our foundations of listening as practice – physically as well as symbolically.
The question of the ‘listened’ seemingly keeps slipping in the experience of the show, for it is hurdled by the compulsive indulgence in the visual (for an alien viewer), which also includes the read, the language, video or the installation (all functions of the eye). The limits of listening are thus metaphorically extended to mean paying careful attention to the ‘object’ at hand, or even speaking to one’s own silences. A counsellor or psychologist’s principal practice, inarguably, is to listen. The curation brings together multiple dimensions of the artist as a listener, and turns him or her into a psychologist of the self. However, one wonders if the curation imagines listening as a value-neutral act?
It is here that we come to interrogate listening as a possible mode of accumulating power. After all, speech is the material of listening. How does the listener draw power? How does the practice of listening constitute power? To be sure, the listener is not a body without agency, rather the centre of power in a discussion. What then, are the ideological and political underpinnings and pursuits of listening? How do we delineate the ethical-moral codes for the practice of listening? Do the speaking individuals objectify themselves in being listened? Such questions bring us to consider if the speaking body has any real agency, or is it only apparent? However, if we agree that voicing is an important act, then it is listening that enables speech. It is the presence of another body that mediates speech. Listening necessarily means to engage, empathize and think with the speaker. It demands attention and participation in meaning-making. Listening may consciously refrain from inviting any intervention during the act of speech. It thus offers a contemplative space where decisions are delayed and negotiations are sustained. Listening capacitates and prolongs the holding of thought just as it rises into the air.
--
Hear, Hear
From the expressions of labourers to the scripts of queer phone conversations, a group show brings together diverse marginalised voices. Anuj Daga listens carefully.
At the outset, the curatorial endeavour of the show As it rises into the air: Listening in Practice from the 21st of August to the 5th of October at the Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, seemed like a rehearsal in the reverse-invocation of Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, where Spivak raises questions on the ways in which we investigate another culture and the ethics of interpreting and representing the other. Curated by Berlin-based Juana Awad and Mumbai-based Zeenat Nagree, the exhibition brings together 13 international and Indian artists whose works refer to various kinds of marginality like colour, class, caste and sexuality. Several artistic practitioners have engaged with under-represented and marginal voices as material for art over the last two decades. In their gentle repositioning of the project within the domain of the listened rather than the spoken, the curators of the present show hoped to invite reflection on the practice of representation wherein the critical gaze is turned to the observer, rather than the observed.
Mumbai-based artist Amol Patil presents archival audio clips of his father’s play who was a mill worker by day and a playwright by night. By methods of superimposition, re-recording and editing the voices on measured lengths of the magnetic audio tape, also originally used by his father, Patil produces a sound that seems to index the environment of labour, as well as the intimation of its theatrical experiments. This work is complimented by Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang whose adjacently placed film Music While We Work documents along with the help of its workers, the sounds of sugar factory in her hometown Huwei. Wang principally stages sound as the collective memory of the labour force’s most significant experience in these closed down factories. Through these installations, both projects push the observer to listen to the experience of class as much as the post-productive quotidian lives of the mill-workers – one imagined in the play-scripts and the other compulsively remembered as music.
Sandeep Kuriakose’s Woh bhi line ka tha transcribes queer phone conversations into an uninterrupted singular script printed on a legal paper, left to be picked up and read by the viewer. The work coaxes the reader to be a voyeuristic listener although privileges the English reader in its decision to transcribe Hindi conversations (along with the English) into the Latin alphabet. Natasha A. Kelly from Germany and Karan Shrestha from India/Nepal sensitize us to the documentary voice of the emotionally or physically suppressed that we customarily attend to in ethnographic histories. Kelly draws our attention to the verbalized experiences of people of colour in Germany whereas Shrestha records the voices of the displaced from the Chitwan National Park in Nepal. In hearing these two works, one wonders if the artist also becomes the mediator of catharsis in one’s role as a patient listener.
Noise composer Raven Chacon’s sound installation remains the most riveting inclusion. Scores of music laid out on standees set a ghost-like stage for a concert that one witnesses on a screen. A disciplined row of gun-shooters fire bullets to the meters and scales of the composition. Although hearing the sonic gunshots on screen dampens the potential experience of the live performance, one can only imagine the lyrical brutality of listening to Chacon’s work in person, simultaneously inversing the notion of both firing and music. Chacon’s work fundamentally and poignantly addresses the questions raised in the curators’ schema. It ‘attacks’ our foundations of listening as practice – physically as well as symbolically.
The question of the ‘listened’ seemingly keeps slipping in the experience of the show, for it is hurdled by the compulsive indulgence in the visual (for an alien viewer), which also includes the read, the language, video or the installation (all functions of the eye). The limits of listening are thus metaphorically extended to mean paying careful attention to the ‘object’ at hand, or even speaking to one’s own silences. A counsellor or psychologist’s principal practice, inarguably, is to listen. The curation brings together multiple dimensions of the artist as a listener, and turns him or her into a psychologist of the self. However, one wonders if the curation imagines listening as a value-neutral act?
It is here that we come to interrogate listening as a possible mode of accumulating power. After all, speech is the material of listening. How does the listener draw power? How does the practice of listening constitute power? To be sure, the listener is not a body without agency, rather the centre of power in a discussion. What then, are the ideological and political underpinnings and pursuits of listening? How do we delineate the ethical-moral codes for the practice of listening? Do the speaking individuals objectify themselves in being listened? Such questions bring us to consider if the speaking body has any real agency, or is it only apparent? However, if we agree that voicing is an important act, then it is listening that enables speech. It is the presence of another body that mediates speech. Listening necessarily means to engage, empathize and think with the speaker. It demands attention and participation in meaning-making. Listening may consciously refrain from inviting any intervention during the act of speech. It thus offers a contemplative space where decisions are delayed and negotiations are sustained. Listening capacitates and prolongs the holding of thought just as it rises into the air.
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