Enrico David, Untitled, 2010 (DAVZ 1). Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London.
What’s in a voice? Sound, of course. Movement too. Lips part, the diaphragm lifts, cords, stretched taut, vibrate. Primarily, the voices we encounter are carriers of meaning – it’s usually only abroad, when this meaning gives way, that the sounds begin to slide over you. Texture – the contours of a voice as it rises and falls – materialises.
It’s this materiality that is the subject of a new exhibition at The Wellcome Collection, which pores over the psychological and physiological spaces voices occupy, particularly when they are not vessels for any information. Language is of secondary concern here, it is the medium that has become the message.
Imogen Stidworthy, Topography of a Voice, 2008-9. Courtesy the artist, Matt’s Gallery, London and AKINCI, Amsterdam.
Imogen Stidworthy, Topography of a Voice, 2008-9. Courtesy the artist, Matt’s Gallery, London and AKINCI, Amsterdam.
In her introduction, curator Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz calls the voice a “mysterious and flexible creature”. It’s this otherly quality the presentation explores. Extracted from conversation or command, and the patterns of sound made by our mouths take on an almost uncanny quality. The space in which the exhibition unfolds allows this to elaborate – many recordings are muffled within headphones, but many others follow you around the room. From the moment you enter, disembodied cries and calls clamour for your attention.
Jochen Gerz, Rufen bis zur Erschöpfung (1972), video still. Credit:Copyright the artist Jochen Gerz 2016.
And there’s a lot to absorb. Each section of the show demands focus for the non-expert; the work of contemporary artists like Imogen Stidworthy and Enrico David is found alongside anatomical models, footage from therapeutic experiments, transcripts and a Tibetan musical score. You’d be hard pushed to take it all in on a single visit.
Yet there’s something intriguingly experimental about this cacophony of information, fitting to a show that probes the many guises our voices take. One work prompts you to consider voice and gender, but the next questions its entanglement with class, and, perhaps most poignantly, geography. Katarina Zdjelar’s exploration of unlearning an accent feels almost dystopian. But the politics of listening is most fully realised by Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s work about a Palestinian refugee, Mohamad, who fails a UK border control “accent test”. Unable to verify his identity through his voice, he now faces deportation.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, An Unspeakable Act, 2012. Courtesy of the Artist. Features in: This Is A Voice, Wellcome Collection.
By the end of the show, the voice feels little less than a natural phenomenon. It haunts our dreams, appears in our innermost thoughts, controls and mediates our identity. It can be harnessed for good – to relate to the world – or for bad – for the world to relegate us. In the final room, you are invited into a soundproofed recording studio, to add your voice to Matthew Herbert’s Chorus. Left alone in the silence, the last voice you hear is your own. What does it say about you?
“This is a Voice” is at the Wellcome Collection, London, until 31 July 2016