Part of Coming to Know
Join us for the Coming to Know closing programme in responds to the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place curated by Nida Ghouse.
On the Sound of Salt with Uzma Rizvi
This talk will take us through the third-millennium BCE archaeological site of MohenjoDaro, Pakistan. In particular, we will spend time listening to the salt and considering how one experiences the salt crystals that are ubiquitous throughout the site. How do we hear sites like MohenjoDaro today? What might an acoustic archaeology provide to our understanding of the ancient world? An archaeology of listening includes many non/human modes of communication, but also, once we hear the site, what does that do for our understanding? Centering these queries, this talk reflects upon the experience of seeing sound.
Uzma Z. Rizvi is an anthropological archaeologist who is associate professor of anthropology and urban studies at the Pratt Institute, New York, and a visiting scholar at the Department of Archaeology at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur. Her research interests include decolonizing archaeology, ancient urbanism, critical heritage studies, new materialism, and post-colonial critique. Uzma interweaves archaeology with cultural criticism, philosophy, critical theory, art, design, and architecture. Her latest monograph, The Affect of Crafting: Third Millennium BCE Copper Arrowheads from Rajasthan, India (2018), follows edited volumes such as Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique (2008) and Connections and Complexity: New Approaches to the Archaeology of South Asia (2013).
Ways of Listening to Spaces with Sukanta Majumdar
This talk is an extension of thoughts reflected in the text "Ways of Listening" from A Slightly Curving Place, the first volume of the series An Archaeology of Listening published with Archive Books. How do we listen to spaces/places? Not only to archaeological sites, but also to spaces that we encounter and inhabit everyday? And why do we need to listen to them? As a sound practitioner and student, Sukanta will address different modes of listening and how these shape our understanding and hence our relationship with the world.
Sukanta Majumdar is a sound artist and audiographer specialized in field recording and sound design for films and theatre. A graduate of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute of India, he has worked as a sound designer for many films and video works, most recently Jole Dobe Na by Naeem Mohaiemen (2020), Cat Sticks by Ronny Sen (2019), and The Kali of Emergency by Ashish Avikunthak (2017). He also co-created The Travelling Archive with Moushumi Bhowmik in 2003, a project for field recording, documenting, and disseminating the folk music of Bengal. In his practice, Sukanta often works with ambient sound and spoken words, and is interested in the sounds of religious and non-religious ritual.