Exhibition

Many voices, all of them loved explores the plurality of ways in which contemporary artists are activating the voice as sonorous, conceptual, metaphorical, and political material. It solicits a recalibration of presumptions about what constitutes a voice, and how it might operate. The voice is commonly conceived as a channel linking speakers and listeners; via technological prostheses, voice connects us across space and time. Underlining the relationality implicit in vocality, Many voices, all of them loved investigates the voice as agent of sociality and exclusion. Fantasies of direct communication are contested, listening is politicised. Attentive to how power differentials, sensory capacities, and linguistic competencies determine how particular voices are ‘heard’, the exhibition sets the audible voice in play with its legible counterpart. Stretching the voice to encompass much more than just humans talking, this exhibition aims to amplify the sounds of inanimate materials, and other-than-human species, as voice. In the works brought into conversation here, vocality is made present as rhythm, as visibly discernible pattern, and as carrier of meaning that extends from, and exceeds speech.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Conflicted Phonemes (2012) examines the weaponisation of linguistic analysis as a crude, punitive tool in the policing of borders. The wall-based work graphically renders the results of accent and dialect testing imposed by immigration authorities upon Somali asylum seekers. Contesting the arrogation of pronunciation as proof against the right to sanctuary, Abu Hamdan maps the infinite, unfixable complexity of voice as an index to biography.

Kader Attia’s Oil and Sugar #2 (2007) brings two of the world’s most freighted, historically charged materials into active, kinetic contention. As oil is absorbed, the sugar-cube edifice inevitably, organically, collapses. In their interaction, these ostensibly mute substances voice their implication within an ongoing history of geopolitical power struggles, extractivist violence, enslavement and displacement.

In DIT LEARN (2017), Laure Prouvost marshals the voice as agent of power and control as well as intimacy and consolation. In a film that delights in the arbitrary nature of linguistic reference, sounds, words and images become unfastened from each other, their interrelations deranged. Through the choreographing of sensory and semantic overload, we are reminded of the pleasures, horrors and comedic consolations of language-learning and, indeed, of learning to speak.

Willem de Rooij’s Ilulissat (2014) is a 12-channel audio installation, collaged from field-recordings of the thousands of sled dogs in one Greenland town. Their polyvocal chorus confronts us with vocality beyond humanity. In listening, we are reminded of the sensuous and social pleasures of embodied vocalization as collective, connective practice. As the dogs call to each other across this place where human and ‘working animal’ lives are unusually enmeshed, we are made newly conscious of our mutual entanglement as sounding co-inhabitants of a shared, threatened world.

Liza Sylvestre’s Captioned: Twentieth Century (2018) uses closed captions to articulate how their seemingly routine omission excludes D/deaf audiences. Sylvestre’s superposition of a silent but distinctively voiced commentary over a 1934 screwball comedy film meditates on her experience of profound hearing loss and elucidates the eloquence of non-verbal communication in cinema. Her captions re-orient focus from the onscreen dialogue to below-screen monologue, directing attention to the many ways that a film can be ‘read’.

In Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s Promised Lands (2015, 2018), sonorous voice and onscreen text interact disruptively. This essayistic film simultaneously ventriloquizes and contests the rhetorical strategies of the colonialist imaginary. In a reflection on the legacies of population displacement between the European and African continents, the political potentiality of the artist’s role as (vocal) observer is tested. Credits as at 24/10/2008 (2008) presents a chronologically ordered record of Wolukau-Wanambwa’s formative influences as perceived on a particular date. Eight centuries of human thought and making are distilled into the form of scrolling credits – resonant voices haunting a film that does not exist.

Many voices, all of them loved is presented by John Hansard Gallery and supported with funding from the AHRC and Mondriaan Fund.