Questioning Sound

In this essay, we analyse the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place to explore what exhibition-making means outside a strictly physical realm.

The act of exhibiting has evolved from merely displaying objects as cabinets of curiosities during the Industrial Age, to an exchange of ideas, a point of mutual influence, relationships, conflicts, and struggles within society, in today’s context. The exhibition explored the possibility of listening to the frequencies of the past. Initiated by curator Nida Ghouse's engagement with self-taught acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi, the exhibition drew practitioners from a wide range of fields. Here, the essence of time was captured through fragments of old and new, and through choreographers, poets, recordists, archivists, and songwriters working together.

This text attempts to further the idea of the performative in relation to artefacts in space by focusing on sound movements. Having trained in the discipline of archaeology, which gives primacy to exploring, segregating, recording, documenting, excavating and measuring objects, and subsequently having worked in a museum for several years, I suggest that this exhibition undoes several assumptions of the notions of exhibition-making. Today's world is filled with hyperopia, where we're forced to accept seemingly futuristic inventions while overlooking the past and present. This exhibition offers a way to think through this condition by way of opening contemporary evocations of sound and performance.

Exhibition location: 'A Slightly Curving Place', Alserkal Avenue, Dubai. Latitude of 25.1412058 and a longitude of 55.2256758. CE 2022.

Terminus Post Quem

Numerous methods were explored in the exhibition to determine its concepts of potential ways to listen via sections named ‘Tuning,’ ‘Recording,’ ‘Digging,’ ‘Transmitting,’ ‘Sound as Surface,’ ‘Exhibition as Technology,’ and ‘A Slightly Curving Place.’ These segments reminded me of the archaeology term ‘Terminus Post Quem’ (TPQ), which determines when artefacts have been deposited in strata. The term means ‘limit after which,’ a term used in archaeology that determines the period within which an artefact can be considered deposited. For example, if a site includes coins dated CE 750 - 850, then the Terminus Post Quem would be CE 850, marking the most recent date of its existence, based on evidence. The discipline of archaeology began as an object-oriented vocation and continues to be based on empirical data. Furthermore, when objects are made the focus of such inquiry, they are often transformed into surrogate humans where, for example, pots are represented as people bearing a cultural history, and are given human-like biographical descriptions. In this exhibition, objects are represented in the form of vitrines, sounds, performances, and choreography. The exhibition itself acted as TPQ by trying to locate the possibility of excavating sound, and leaves us with a question, ‘Can sound be located in the past or the present?’

Could TPQ help think about sound as evidence? What exactly is sound? Could its existence constitute an event? What relationship do sounding objects have with the sounds they produce? Temporal and causal features of sound are vital in responding to these and related questions. However, it is a way to organise or respond to these questions, possibly dealing with the spatial properties of sound in relation to the space within which it is performed. The exhibition addressed this issue by emphasising sound and performance that considered locating history as a continuum rather than a chronology.

‘A Slightly Curving Place’ derives its title from a Prakrit phrase in the Jain cosmology of Hinduism known as Isipabbharabhumi, which refers to a place above the heavens shaped like a parasol. A collection of objects, images, publications, and videos in and around vitrines was among the exhibition's various elements. ‘Tuning,’ ‘Recording,’ and ‘Digging’ served as three main concepts in the exhibition to illustrate the complexity of attempting to listen to the past. This exhibition challenged the viewer to rethink what listening collectively means and whether it is possible to listen to the past consciously.

One could say that this exhibition acted as a sound instrument to capture sonic notations by undoing the hierarchy of object-centred concepts. This method of curating relied on arranging display units in a manner that critiqued the cabinets-of-curiosities method of exhibition-making starting with the Tuning section filled with deconstructed parts of Galena Crystal Radio (2017). The Recording section was made of ephemeral fragments such as Kalidas' Meghduta and Haramoni (Lost Jewelry), a book of Bengali folk songs. The artwork Uzma's Shadow was used in the digging section to reference the power of images that demonstrate resistance to colonial iconography. Unknown Radio Object (URO) was a reproduction of a handmade radio device that resembled the shape of the human body. It was evident in Jhonda Tribe Radio, which used the radio as a ritual device and as a transporter of sounds of memories of ancestors during the rise of modernity in India in the late 19th century. The region occupied by the Jhonda tribe was a source of industrial waste produced by multinational mining companies. The ‘Sound as Surface’ section used earthly materials such as wax, shellac, vinyl and coal as a means of transferring sound in some of the earliest experiments with sound devices from the late 19th century.

The 'Exhibition as Technology' section was a sound-echoing room featuring a round platform with a slightly elongated edge where listeners could sit and experience the space's acoustic properties.

It explored the properties of sound through the creation of space that featured a rock-cut cave resembling ancient theatrical landscapes. Here, sound was transformed through multiple relays between script and voice, like a pre-modern space that re-imagined itself into pictures, songs and technology via sound installation. It offered an atmospheric cave to a curious gathering of listeners, but it could also resemble an open-air landscape, unearthing a past unknown to them, almost as if they were deciphering the ruins of an archaeological site.

A video installation, titled A Slightly Curving Place, by Padmini Chettur and Maarten Visser was filmed at an archaeological site that was relocated from its excavation site to Anupu in Andhra Pradesh, India. There may have been an amphitheatre in the space. Throughout the artwork, there were different perspectives to observe, such as the dancer's body moving to evoke a sense of stillness, bringing echoes of the past into the present. Through movement, the dancer incorporated slowness, similar to friction between the body and the large site.

A series of layers was created in this exhibition, suggestive of TPQ, a stratigraphy of archaeological mounds in the present day. It used the topography of soundscape and explored the potential of spatial significance through transdisciplinary experiments. It does so as if the installations were devices reverberating with sounds that intertwined with technological edifices. The vitrines in the exhibition were used as a critique of colonial museological or taxonomical discourse by interrupting the colonial framework of exhibition-making. Enacting a series of constellations of interpersonal relationships between artefacts, the exhibition put under scrutiny a material memory of sound itself. Invisible radio waves occupied a central place in the exhibition, involving the viewer as an active echolocation of the works.

The combination of sound, movement and non-linear storytelling conceptualises memory as an embodied and dynamic experience that permeates the present. Architectural materials, forms and technology affect our perceptions of sound, as does the body itself. Through a longue durée approach (a perspective on history that extends further into the past than both human memory and the archaeological record to incorporate climatology, demography, geology, and oceanology, and charts the effects of events that occur so slowly as to be imperceptible to those who experience them) the exhibition communicates with the past such that it becomes impossible to segregate relationships between people, groups, artefacts and sensorial flows and instabilities. The longue durée focuses on slowly changing relationships between people and their surroundings over time, a process that happens subtly.

The exhibition invited people to reflect on and re-imagine the possibility of listening to the past and how sound can be transformed into sensorial material. The exhibition left visitors questioning whether these shapes decipher what and to whom we need to listen. Our ability to perceive the past as a flux helps us cope with the noise of the present. It is continuously reverberating and demanding that we understand our own mechanism for acoustic changes in the landscapes we occupy today.

Himanshu Kadam is Curator of Programmes, and Operations Manager at Ishara Art Foundation.

A Slightly Curving Place exhibited at Concrete at Alserkal Avenue Art Week over March 3-13, 2022.