Public programmes and research

Nottingham Contemporary’s new public programme and research strand, Sonic Continuum, investigates practices of world-making through sound, both as a force that constitutes the world and a medium for producing knowledge about it. Thinking through sound, silence and speech, whose voices are heard, who listens, and by what means, Sonic Continuum explores the sonic as the articulation of tempos and cycles of time.

By assembling multiple, overlapping timeframes, it proposes rhythm as a relational language, and conjoins our senses with the muted, the unsound, and the not-yet audible for imagining new solidarities, aural alliances and forms of attunement. Playing with notions of voice and address, it attends to the grammars that shape our differential experiences of the world, and asks: can sound restitute failures to listen? How might we listen to time affectively? What auditory imaginaries and possible futures can listening unfold? 

The sonic offers a multidirectional form of social experience against the law-like authority of clock-time, set alongside the evolutionary tempos and rhythms of extinction as well as everyday metabolic processes and broader socio-political chronologies. Investigating how listening might exceed existing frameworks of representation, Sonic Continuum manifests over the course of 2020 as a symposia series, accompanied by a writer in residence.

Symposia series

Histories of Listening, March 28-29
Departing from global histories of trade, Histories of Listening investigates how the complex of time emerged out of colonial encounters between human, vegetal and mineral lives. The two-day programme of talks, moving image, poetry and performance explores the colonial management of the senses, and how pulsing rhythms of colonial modernity are central to capitalist modes of production.

Acousmatic Paranoia, April 25
An afternoon of talks and performances expanding on the artistic practice of Sung Tieu (b. 1987, Vietnam), Acousmatic Paranoia is attuned to the ways in which resonant frequencies can redefine spaces of conflict. Exploring the materiality of sound through historical and contemporary manifestations of sonic warfare, auditory governance and the psychoacoustic dimensions of fear, it considers the role of contemporary art in actualising sonic agency.

Listening as Critique, June 27–28
Conjuring the imaginative potential for voicing other worlds, Listening as Critique explores sonic modes of knowing and being that evade or refuse representation, transparency and legibility. Departing from the afterlives of slavery and enduring legacies of colonialism, to anticolonial liberation struggles and international solidarity networks, it listens to how musical forms, languages and sensibilities are transformed by transnational movements.

Expanded Listening, October 23–24 
A sounding of ecological relations, Expanded Listening tunes to the haptic and sensorial dynamics of listening across auditory registers and a wide spectrum of frequencies. It energises modes of listening beyond the ear that are attentive to the sound of political climates and the languages of more-than-human worlds towards renewed kinships and a longer tempo of auditory awareness. 

Contributors: AUDINT, Space Afrika, Manuel Ángel Macía, Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lucinda Chua, Jonathan Curry-Machado, Clémentine Deliss, Sasha Engelmann, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Steve Goodman (Kode9), Paz Guevara, Toby Heys, Louis Henderson, Radio Earth Hold, Satch Hoyt, Evan Ifekoya, Eleni Ikoniadou, Sarah Jackson, Hannah Catherine Jones, Jota Mombaça, Pedro Neves Marques, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Arjuna Neuman, Selina Nwulu, Tavia Nyong'o, Bhavisha Panchia, Luciana Parisi, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Diana Policarpo, Elizabeth Povinelli, Martin Savransky, Ashkan Sepahvand, Libita Sibungu, Jenna Sutela, Nisha Ramayya, Tabita Rezaire, Aura Satz, Jol Thoms, Marie Thompson, Syma Tariq, Sung Tieu, Salomé Voegelin, Michelle M. Wright, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Belinda Zhawi (MA.MOYO), and more.  

Writer in residence 2020–21
In 2020–21, Nottingham Contemporary welcomes TIME TRAVEL / DIASPORA, a project by Jota Mombaça and the LABORATORY OF VISIONARY FICTION, an emergent, speculative platform focused on the study of the intersections between political imagination and visionary forms of art, literature and philosophical critique.

Curated by Sofia Lemos. All Nottingham Contemporary public programme and research events are free through the generous support of the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University. For more information, visit nottinghamcontemporary.org