Social Acoustics (notes toward a future band)
2022

Social Acoustics addresses the ways in which sound and listening afford social and more-than-social processes and imaginaries. This includes a consideration of the relational potentialities inherent to sound and acoustic materiality, and how processes of sounding and listening lend to capturing agency and action that are equally attuned to empathy, compassion, and healing. Conceptually, the exhibition is structured around the notion of the concert, elaborating the scene of live music as one of collaboration, cooperation, and entanglement. To concert becomes a greater enactment where performing together is not only found in musicking, but equally through a range of gestures and media. This integrates a deep relational sensing of nonhuman matter, where things and objects become instrumental actants within a greater ensemble, as well as a rethinking of the sound body and what constitutes modes of listening. Bringing together a set of works and materials, as well as a performance presented by guest artist Doa Aly, the exhibition becomes a scene of reverberant matters that span personal memory, collaborative labor, lyrical meditation, noisy agents, and notes toward a future band.

Developed and presented at Bergen Kjøtt, Norway, in collaboration with Jill Halstead. August 12 – September 4, 2022.