Uncurating Sound

Uncurating Sound performs, across five chapters, a deliberation between art, politics, knowledge and normativity. It foregrounds the perfidy of norms and engages in the curatorial as a colonial knowledge project, whose economy of exploitation draws a straight line from Enlightenment’s desire for objectivity, through sugar, cotton and tobacco, via lives lost and money made to the violence of contemporary art.

It takes from curation the notion of care and thinks it through purposeful inefficiency as resistance: going sideways and another way. Thus it moves curation through the double negative of not not to ＂uncuration＂ untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution.

Looking at Kara Walker’s work, the book invites the performance of the curatorial via indivisible connections and processes. Reading Kathy Acker and Adrian Piper it speculates on how the body brings us to knowledge beyond the ordinary. Playing Kate Carr and Ellen Fullman it re-examines Modernism’s colonial ideology, and materialises the vibrational presence of a plural sense. Listening to Marguerite Humeau and Manon de Boer it avoids theory but agitates a direct knowing from voice and hands, and feet and ears that disorder hegemonic knowledge strands in favour of local, tacit, feminist and contingent knowledges that demand like Zanele Muholi’s photographs, an ethical engagement with the work/world.

Salomé Voegelin is Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, UAL, and an artist and writer engaged in listening as a socio-political practice of sound. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014) and The Political Possibility of Sound (2018), all by Bloomsbury Academic. Her work and writing deal with sound and the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view.