Combining many different artistic mediums, from sculpture to sonic installation, the Nottingham Contemporary’s latest group exhibition: Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen, explores sound and music and their relationship to themes like colonisation and dispossession.
A lot of the time, sound and music are concepts that we take for granted. We hear both so often that we rarely think about them in much detail – usually they’re just sensory information that’s either melodic or abrasive – comfortable or uncomfortable for us to listen to. But what if we asked: who ‘hears’ certain sounds, and who does not? Who ‘gets heard’, and who does not? What counts as ‘sound’, and what counts as ‘music’?
The Nottingham Contemporary’s latest group exhibition – Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen – poses these questions, among others. Via sound installation, sculpture, textiles, painting, and performance, the display ‘listens back’ to untold or lost histories – reinterpreting how sound was ‘positioned’ at a certain time and place.
The artworks in Gallery one tackle these themes with imagination and individuality – they’re predominantly the creations of Berlin-based visual artist and musician Satch Hoyt, who is of Jamaican-British descent. Hoyt’s work tackles what he calls the ‘Eternal-Afro-Sonic-Signifier’: a soundscape, paralleling the actual and memorised sound which accompanied enslaved Africans when they were forcibly taken from their home countries.
As well as musical notation, the images also resemble oceans, with paths charted through them by ships
The paintings are the first artworks that you notice. They resemble ‘graphic scores’: a method by which contemporary composers often write down music. As well as musical notation, the images also resemble oceans, with paths charted through them by ships.
The soundscape playing over the speakers, meanwhile, is alternately abrasive and futuristic or traditionally African in tone. Hoyt composed it – we’re told via placard – at the British Museum, playing antique African instruments usually kept in storage.
Gallery two tackles similar themes, but from different angles. First, you’re invited to see an immersive series of films titled How to improve the World, created by Vietnamese artist Nguyen Trinh Thi.
Set in Vietnam’s central highlands, this three-screen installation sees Nguyen ask locals about their ‘first memory’ of sound or visuals. The result is an intriguing collage of dialogues and music, conveying the importance of aural tradition – stories passed down through generations, through sound: singing or playing – which is an important method of resisting colonisation and dispossession.
From textiles that interpret a traditional greeting in Mayan languages, to preserved, working songs sung by Sugarcane workers in Taiwan, there are too many more works to mention here. All-in-all, however, the exhibition is a very compelling chapter in the ever-fascinating story of the Nottingham Contemporary.
It’s worth checking out – if only for how unpredictable it is. From room to room you have very little idea of what you’ll be seeing or listening to next but you know, without a doubt, that the experience will truly transport you to another time and place.
Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen is at the Nottingham Contemporary until Sunday 7 September.
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