Nottingham Contemporary presents Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen, a major thematic exhibition that brings together a wide range of responses to the evocative power of sound. This exhibition will explore how sound connects us with histories, places and identities, and how it travels and transitions across cultural contexts and temporal realities.
Sound by nature is ephemeral and fleeting, existing only in the present. To preserve or play back sound, it must be fixed through memory, ritual or recording. The practice of sound recording has been rooted in histories of colonial contact and dominance since its emergence at the end of the 19th century, utilised as a tool to capture and contain the “other”. Yet, sound recordings also offer intimate portals that connect listeners across time and space, conveying atmosphere and context in ways that images alone cannot.
What happens when artists listen back to these archives of sound? How do they respond to the silenced, erased or censored histories embedded in these recordings? How do they create new recordings to hold historical dissonance? Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen presents artworks in which the encounter between artists and hegemonic colonial sound histories becomes the generator of new stories and possible futures.
Drawing from both personal and familial memories, or official sound archives, several artworks in this exhibition invite reflection on the difference between aural and visual memory while emphasising how sound is entangled with place, landscape, and home, shaping our emotional and political connections to these spaces. Sound carries, hides and reveals histories of migration, land, and ancestry, and when these stories are told through Indigenous and diasporic experiences, they generate and invite new forms of listening.
Other works reflect on histories that remain untold or erased by official archives. The censorship of music during South Africa’s apartheid or the silence in which historical instruments from the African continent are preserved in museum collections become catalysts for artists to interrogate official and authoritative sound histories. These artistic proposals for ‘sonic restitution’ reflect current debates and calls for the decolonisation of Western museums, demonstrating the value of contemporary artistic contributions to debates and dialogues related to sonic heritage.
Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen challenges and expands the Western-centric canon of sound art, offering a rich, international selection of multi-generational, Indigenous and Global Majority artists who engage with sound in complex, layered and multimedia formats. Comprised of new commissions alongside loaned artworks this ambitious group exhibition includes a range of artistic practices and mediums including painting, sculpture, reworked analogue sound, multi-channel sound installations, and collections of oral histories, and will be accompanied by a dynamic live programme of events and performances.
Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen features artists including: Hellen Ascoli, Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Sky Hopinka, Satch Hoyt, Yee I-Lann, Arturo Kameya, Raheel Khan, Zahra Malkani, John Peffer, Dylan Robinson, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Hajra Waheed and Hong-Kai Wang.
Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen press release
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