Peal the Bells

Artists: Noor Abed, Anoushka Akel, Qianye and Qianhe Lin, Maree Sheehan, Mo H. Zareei.

Peal the Bells brings together five projects within which the voice is a primary element. These works span the explicitly political to more coded representations of speech, song and silence. Citing connections between the voice and the bell—an instrument complete with a tongue, a lip, a mouth—Peal the Bells proposes that the way we speak and listen to each other is a meaningful index of our times. More immediately, these works remind us that speech is an act that involves the whole body. 
 
Maree Sheehan’s work Ōtairongo (2020) comprises audio portraits of three wāhine Māori (Māori women), Te Rita Papesch, Ramon Te Wake, and Moana Maniapoto. Made for listening to in solitude and relative darkness, these works are composed from sources including published music, intimate conversation, taonga puoro (traditional Māori musical instruments) and the ambient sounds of home, street and coastline. Layered representations rather than conventional portraits—specifically, colonial portraiture based on reductive visual identifiers—Sheehan’s works enact a form of sonic resistance.

Anoushka Akel’s painting series, Spine, No, Happily (2026) hinges on recent mass-circulated images of speech, refusal and performative action by women in the political arena. Akel’s almost-abstract paintings circle around these events, halting on details, like slow counterweights to the video and photographic images’ accelerated distribution. These works subtly turn our attention to nonverbal communication, and to architectural forms, such as the hemicycle debating chamber or the speaker’s lectern, that imagine decisive speech.

Presented as large black and white prints, Mo H. Zareei’s Department Press Briefings (2026) is a series of sixteen concrete poems generated from repetitive language found in official government documents, paired with sonic arrangements drawn from these phrases. Dislocated from the transcript, the words are only obliquely allusive, opaque, while in the audio component, smoothly delivered statements of assurance become stuttering, glitchy, erratically modulated. A small detail—the original document’s date recorded along the base of each print—brings us back to real time and actual events, asserting that these seemingly emptied-out words retain their heavy effect on the world. 

Noor Abed’s film A Night We Held Between (2024) centres around the ‘Song for The Fighters’, found by the artist in the sonic archive of the Popular Art Centre Palestine. Abed writes of the work (one of a series of three), “These films can be seen as historical documents from an unknown archive, while connecting us to an imaginary that has yet to unfold, and the possibility of new social and representational formations in Palestine.” The perspective moves between the pale dusty surface and the subterranean and is often filmed from inside hollows in the land. No voiceover or text provides context for the landscape or the choreography that runs through it, rather the song’s lyrics and movement itself take the role of narration.

Qianye and Qianhe Lin’s video installation a story is not a promise / a choral monologue (2026) is built on the collective reading of poetic script, recorded unrehearsed. Spanning contexts including language acquisition classes, ritual or religious settings, nationalistic ceremonies, works of theatre, and practices of solidarity in protest movements, recitation may serve to unify, discipline or educate members of a group. In the Lins’ work the performance of recitation is underscored by questions: what is a collective voice? How might we situate ourselves within official languages that are prevalent due to imperialism? How is one oriented, or disoriented. by participating in a chorus?

Across the artworks in Peal the Bells, the voice is referenced or heard in critique, lament, protest, and through the absence of sound altogether. Like the bell, each of these works emits direct and legible signs, yet they also reverberate with that which is harder to articulate, and may be experienced in the body as much as heard in the ears. As such, Peal the Bells is a prompt to attune to multiple alternative modes—critical, somatic, empathetic—of listening.

Co-curated by Abby Cunnane and Vera Mey