new work will tour in Seeing Sound curated by Barbara London

January 9, 2020

For updates on venues see: https://curatorsintl.org/exhibitions/seeing-sound

Sound is a sensorial and pliant material, an intangible part of daily life. For the artists in Seeing Sound, it is the chosen medium for experimentation when art is in a perpetual state of flux. Featuring the work of Seth Cluett, Juan Cortés, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Bani Haykal, Yuko Mohri, Marina Rosenfeld, Aura Satz, and Samson Young, the exhibition foregrounds artistic practices that deconstruct, rebuild, manipulate, and visualize audio experience through digital and analog means.

Working across music and composition, video and performance, sculpture and installation, the artists—from New York, London, Bogotá, Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong—establish and highlight new meaning for the unheard by transcending conventional relationships to sound. Their work brings disparate contexts together: the drone of a telephone dial tone in relation to electronic music; pastoral silence that coexists with intermittent urban noise; or the imagined seraphic sounds of the universe.

Curated by Barbara London, a pioneering champion of time-based media, the exhibition places visitors in immersive encounters with sound as art. It challenges the private quality of our contemporary sonic experience. Instead of relying on headphones and earbuds, which isolate the listener, the artworks in the exhibition create expansive sonic landscapes.

The exhibition was developed with support from Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), giving access to the latest in sonic technology and providing venues with experimental advances for the presentation of sound works. Along the tour, art spaces will be able to integrate these technologies into their programming, to collaborate with an artist across the world, or create telematic, long-distance performances. This is one of the ways that the exhibition uses technology not to isolate, but to unite as it travels.

Artists: Seth Cluett, Juan Cortés, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Bani Haykal, Yuko Mohri, Marina Rosenfeld, Aura Satz, and Samson Young

Seeing Sound is a traveling exhibition curated by Barbara London, with the support of Research Assistant Kristen Clevenson and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI). This exhibition and tour are supported, in part, by Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) program and with the generous support of ICI’s Board of Trustees and International Forum.

Nokia Bell Labs is the world-renowned industrial research arm of Nokia. Over its more than 90-year history, Bell Labs has invented many of the foundational technologies that underpin information and communications networks and all digital devices and systems. This research has resulted in 9 Nobel Prizes, three Turing Awards, three Japan Prizes, a plethora of National Medals of Science and Engineering, as well as an Oscar, two Grammy awards and an Emmy award for technical innovation. For more information, visit www.bell-labs.com