Nida Ghouse: The Labour of Listening
Lecture with artist and curator Nida Ghouse, organized by the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies.
What if we consider the space and time of sound, its volume and its duration, as a means of re-conceiving the boundaries between “art” and its “public”? Could this alter our understanding of the nature of the “exhibition” itself? In thinking of the exhibition as an occasion for an assembly of listeners, this talk does not mean to privilege the medium of sound in the making and displaying of art—it is not about the category of sound art, for instance. Rather it intends to take up the polyphony of sound—as object, as surface, as event—to shift our attention towards what the labour of listening is. Listening is something we do not just do to sound but to images and objects, as well as to technology and matter at large. What are the body and cultural techniques involved in practices of listening? How are they transmitted through artworks that are themselves listening to things? What kind of history of listening could we tell? And what can an exhibition of listening be?
The talk will trace a set of distinct but related questions through three exhibitions: A Slightly Curving Place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2020), which asked what does it mean to listen to the past and its absence which remains; Shifting Center at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy (2023), which attended to the acoustic inheritances between the colonial museum and the contemporary art gallery; and Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didn’t hear you as part of Dystopia Biennial in Berlin (2024), which was curatorially concerned with the materiality of inaudibility as means of confronting the medium of sound at its limits.