Best in show

“My aim was to make a show that examines the actual process of listening itself rather than concentrating on sound and the things that make it.

A number of different aural experiences pull people around the gallery, noises that range from the quiet and intimate to something a little more violent and arresting.

For example, Amalia Pica’s piece comprises a glass stuck to the long wall of the space inviting visitors to listen in to what people might be talking about elsewhere in the room.

At the other end of the volume scale is Thunder, Hannah Rickards’ clap of thunder that has been recorded, stretched and aurally dissected, recreated by musicians and then morphed back into a thunderclap.

It’s now just half a second long and plays out loudly seven or eight times an hour, taking people completely by surprise.

Imogen Stidworthy’s video installation unravels the many layers of the human voice through the work of Sacha van Loo, a wiretap analyst employed by the Belgian police.

Sacha has been blind from birth and has developed incredible levels of acoustic perception, enabling him to pinpoint peoples’ precise locations within a space. He also speaks seven languages and is able to recognise hundreds of different dialects and accents.

His job is to review recordings of drug dealers and others involved in criminal activity and to figure out who’s saying what, where they’re from and what their intentions might be.

There’s quite a mixture of sounds as he listens to the recordings and taps his computer, which then delivers his notes back to him through audio description software.

I think the exhibition could be seen as a direct response to the difficulty of working with sound in a gallery where noises from different works can often bleed into one another no matter how carefully the event is staged.

Curators have traditionally got around that problem in two ways: one is to have all the sounds in isolation – on headphones, for example – while the other has them all going off at once like some cacophonous mixtape.

I’m using choreography with different sounds arranged to appear at different times, allowing the works room to breathe and the chance to speak for themselves. Some are planned but others are down to pure chance.

That means you might be tuned into the tapping of Sacha’s computer which will be promptly followed by the waves of the sea from across the gallery…and then the unscheduled, staggering din of Rickards’ thunderclap will take you somewhere else entirely without warning.”

Listening, the latest Hayward Touring Curatorial Open exhibition, runs at Baltic 39, Newcastle upon Tyne, until 11 January 2015

Artist Sam Belinfante is the curator of Listening