This research project is led by me, Sarah Hayden. I’m a writer and Professor of Experimental Writing and Art at the University of Southampton. Voices in the Gallery is funded by two AHRC Innovation Leadership Fellowships (2019-2021, 2021-23).
Backstory:
The first phase (2019-2021) of Voices in the Gallery considered voiceover as a phenomenon that exists simultaneously as art-form, literary genre and sonic intervention in gallery space. It generated articles, talks, public events (including workshops, Voicing the Political study sessions and external collaborations) staged in conjunction with John Hansard Gallery and Nottingham Contemporary. As part of this work, I curated the exhibition, ‘Many voices, all of them loved’, featuring work by Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Laure Prouvost, Kader Attia, Willem de Rooij, Liza Sylvestre and Lawrence Abu Hamdan at John Hansard Gallery in spring 2020 and guest-curated a strand of for Queer Art Projects’ #WIP: an exhibition themed around process and work-in-progress. My strand featured voice-in-video work and process documentation from Sam Keogh, Larry Achiampong, Sophie Seita, Naeem Mohaiemen, and P. Staff. You can find out more about this first phase of the project via links in the menu and footer of this page.
From this starting point, and via the collaborations it instantiated, Voices in the Gallery developed from a project about voice in art into one about voice, text, and access. ‘A Cognitive Listening’: my 2023 essay on captioning as unvoiceover explains the impetus for this shift.
About the Project:
‘Voices in the Gallery’ is a research project about how voice, text and access intersect in contemporary art.
Right now:
I’m currently (in 2023-24) collaborating with Liza Sylvestre and Christopher Robert Jones of Crip* on the Blue Description Project (BDP). Invested in a cripistemological (a portmanteau of ‘crip’ and ‘epistemological’) creative-critical framework where Disabled/Crip epistemologies function methodologically rather than as mere subject matter, the Blue Description Project engages Derek Jarman's Blue (1993) via expanded and critical accessibility.
The Blue Description Project premiered on February 15th 2024 (with ASL interpretation) at SAIC as part of the Conversations at the Edge series. Since then, it has been presented at BFI, London (with BSL, March 8th), MIT List Visual Arts Centre, Boston (March 14th) Personal Space Gallery, California (April 7th), Irish Film Institute, Dublin (with ISL June 5th), Triskel Arts Centre, Cork (June 6th), Bonington Gallery, Nottingham (with BSL, June 13th). The next presentation will be at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (with ASL, July 17th).
Meanwhile, alongside other publications, I’m writing a book, provisionally titled In receipt of voice, for University of Minnesota Press.
Recently:
Across 2021-2022, I worked closely with LUX on slow emergency siren, ongoing: a project to make Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs more, and differently, accessible. Together, we commissioned Elaine Lillian Joseph to write and perform augmented audio description for the film and invited the Care-fuffle Working Group to develop creative captions. Audio-description and caption-users advised on the translations of sounds and images as they evolved.
The newly captioned and audio-described Handsworth Songs was first screened at LUX on 2nd October 2022, then at MAC Birmingham on 11th June 2023, and is now available from LUX for screenings and exhibitions.
Hannah Kemp-Welch was commissioned to make Voices Surface: An Audio-Documentary about Accessing Handsworth Songs. Captioned by Care-fuffle, this audio-documentary can now be heard, watched or read via the LUX website.
As part of slow emergency siren, ongoing I also worked with Daly & Lyon, An Endless Supply and the UK Association for Accessible Formats to design a large-print book and website. This dual-format publication makes the captions and annotated audio description available to read or hear, and also contains new essays on Handsworth Songs (by Clive Nwonka) and audio description (by me). In spring 2024, we made available the Notes on the Design: an accessibly designed digital guide, explaining how and why both formats of the slow emergency siren, ongoing publication look, sound and feel the way they do.
In 2022, I curated Liza Sylvestre’s asweetsea at John Hansard Gallery (8th October 2022 - 14th January 2023). This was Sylvestre’s first solo exhibition outside of the United States and featured newly commissioned video, sculptures, drawings and (captioned) audio tours. As an artist who is deaf, and whose child and partner are both hearing, Liza Sylvestre tries to locate where her disability lives within their family. She conceives of her work as a site to share experience and to form new ways of understanding the intersection of senses, access, and learned systems of communication. In asweetsea, Sylvestre’s playful, probing works investigated how we make, share and access meaning together. A new iteration of asweetsea was at Collective in Edinburgh from 21st October to 23rd December 2023.
With Hannah Wallis, I co-led a new Art of Captioning British Art Network research group. Online public events to date have included a panel discussion with access workers and BSL interpreters on Making Access Work and a workshop with Care-fuffle Working Group and Nina Thomas on Caption-writing and Caption Consultation. Our third (live-streamed) public event, Temporalities of Access, took place in conjunction with Wysing Arts Centre on November 5th 2022.
In 2022, I also worked with Wysing Arts Centre on A Language of Holes: a project exploring innovative approaches to captioning in live contexts. For our first strand, we collaborated with Club Urania to present a performance commission from Nat Raha. Social practice sound artist Hannah Kemp-Welch is a collaborator across many parts of the project. As part of A Language of Holes, she delivered a series of accessible o-o radio workshops to young people at Wysing.
In 2021, I worked with Nottingham Contemporary and Hannah Wallis to devise the Caption-Conscious Ecology workshop and talk series. With support from an ArtFund Reimagine Grant, we’re now all working together to developing an exciting two-part Caption-Conscious commissioning project. More news on this later in 2023.
Recently, I’ve been collaborating with the Rights Access and Refusal Working Group of the JUST AI project. RAR is led by Louise Hickman and Alexa Hagerty. My submission to the working group took the form of an exercise in embodied, expansive description.
Through these and other activities, the second phase of Voices in the Gallery is exploring the relations—variously fluent and frustrating, definitely in flux—between speech, text, technology and access in art.
Meanwhile, alongside other publications and talks, I’m writing a book, provisionally titled In receipt of voice, for University of Minnesota Press.