Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

Fellows und Mitarbeitende des ZI sowie Gastwissenschaftlerinnen und Gastwissenschaftler berichten über laufende Arbeiten. Die offene Form des Workshops ermöglicht eine intensive Diskussion.

As Hito Steyerl has argued, we must not only ask with Gayatri Spivak’s famous words: “Can the subaltern speak?” (Spivak 1997) “Instead, the question must be: But even if he or she has been talking on for centuries–why didn’t anybody listen?” (Steyerl 2002) This question around the audibility of speech brings to the fore that listening is a highly political act and needs to be one of the tasks of a postcolonial and antiracist critique. In the context of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, Saidiya Hartman stresses the immense difficulty of this task when the archive is full of silences: “listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words, and refashioning disfigured lives” is the journey towards “the impossible goal: redressing the past violence” (Hartman 2008, 2f.). Engaging with photographs of the Black diaspora, Tina Campt equally aims to listen to forgotten histories and suppressed memory (cf. Campt  2017, 6). These are just some of the many prominent voices who have explored listening as a mode of engaging with troubled pasts, which I see in relation to a growing interest in artistically engaging with sound and listening since the second half of the 20^th century.

Listening has been a topic in French theory since the 1980s (Barthes 1985, Nancy 2002), while larger art historical surveys on sound art came up in the late 1990s (de la Motte Haber 1999, Kahn 1999). There have been additional contributions on sound and listening since the 2000s across disciplines ranging from Media Studies, Music and Sound Studies (Sterne 2003, Lacey 2013, Holl 2018, Fillerup/Love 2022), to anti-racist perspectives on listening and sound within Black Studies (Hartman 2019, Campt 2017, Moten 2003), as well as contributions on the colonial histories of sound recordings and archives (Hilden 2022, Ismaiel-Wendt/ Schoon 2022). While more and more aural and oral artistic practices build on these insights from postcolonial theory and aim to work towards a decolonization of Western museums and their (sound) archives, these contributions still need to be explored in depth from an art historical perspective.

While art history has classically focussed on the visual, I claim that we need to include the study of the aural to understand not only its relation to the visual but also its critical potentials for an artistic approach to history. Exploring a variety of artistic practices dealing with violence and resistance via sound and listening, this postdoctoral project aims to contribute to the young research field of aurality in contemporary art. In opposition to conceptual sound art in the early and mid-20^th century, artists have since then engaged with aurality to mediate socio-political contexts: focusing not only the use of sound as a disciplinary tool (Gribenski 2024, Engin 2024) and the hegemonic power structures behind recording, distribution, and reception of sounds (Ismaiel-Wendt/ Schoon 2022), but also on the subversive potentials of sound (Scales 2010) and the empowering qualities of listening (LaBelle 2018). I build on the hypothesis that a renewed attention to the aural in art is connected to the global turn with its focus on connected histories and global entanglements (Subrahmanyam 1997, Juneja 2023), the digital turn with its information overload (Shah 2022) and saturation with images of disaster (Juneja/Schenk 2014, Sontag 2003), as well as the affective turn (Seigworth/Pedwell 2023, Clough/Halley 2007) with its focus on embodiment. Having these turns in mind, I will explore the ways in which artists turn to the oral register as a form of critique of the dominance of the visual and as an attempt to access entangled histories differently.

[Caption: Shilpa Gupta, For, in your tongue, I cannot fit (2017-2018), Sound installation with 100 speakers, microphones, printed text and metal stands, 1800 x 1800 cm, approx. 70mins loop, copyright the artist]