arts and design

Sounds Like Her review – singing sculptures and a choir of silence

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Sounds Like Her is full of ghosts. Spectres howl from speakers, they slip in between the shadowy shapes of people dancing, they push apart thick black lines of charcoal on white paper. The thing that is invisible yet still breathing down your neck in this exhibition is sound. It’s what ties together the six female artists at York Art Gallery and it is the centre of every work, whether it is a painting, video or installation.

Like the many female-centric shows currently correcting gender imbalance in the art world, Sounds Like Her creates a space where we can encounter sound-art practitioners working beyond the rigid patriarchal superstructures. For Ain Bailey, this means recording women forcing their voices into the “preferred” female pitch (A-flat below middle C, apparently); for Magda Stawarska-Beavan, it involves embracing the roles of mother and artist and recording her son’s first cry; for Sonia Boyce, it is plastering the wall in the names of black British women in the music industry.

The Devotional Series, 2008-ongoing, by Sonia Boyce.



Tribute to black British female musicians … the Devotional Series, 2008-ongoing, by Sonia Boyce. Photograph: Courtesy the artist

Patriarchy isn’t the only hierarchy on the guillotine; Eurocentricity and disability discrimination are also up for the chop. Art flies over from America and Cameroon, touches on China and draws out artists of diverse heritage, making plenty of room for black artists for whom curator Christine Eyene has been championing for years (see All of Us Have a Sense of Rhythm at David Roberts Art Foundation). Madeleine Mbida’s colourful multi-layered silhouettes bounce around her canvases, capturing the boundless energy of Cameroonian bikutsi music. The dancers are framed by heavy black symbols similar to the notes you’d find in a musical score, but this notation references a 6/8 rhythm that doesn’t exist in music theory.

Elsewhere, Eyene places a deaf artist at the centre of her exhibition about noise. Deaf from birth, Christine Sun Kim’s drawings and performances are the star of this show, taking us to a place where sound exists as a physical form that can create paintings and movement. Videos of previous performances document Sun Kim’s various experiments using sound. In one scene, she uses the vibrations of a subwoofer to create Speaker Drawings, and in another, she conducts a choir of deaf participants to use facial expressions to “sing”. On the opposite wall, musical scores drawn by her encapsulate everyday, unnoticed noises such as footsteps on a stair, the clank of toothbrushes in a bathroom or the restlessness of patients in a doctor’s waiting room. Sun Kim can only “hear” the sounds through observing human interaction.

Work by Madeleine Mbida in the exhibition Sounds Like Her at York Art Gallery.



Capturing the energy of Cameroonian music … painting by Madeleine Mbida. Photograph: Lee Clark

Such a sweeping array of ideas has its limitations. At times it feels stretched out too far. There is little to link Boyce’s powerful celebration of black British musicians with Linda O’Keeffe’s recordings of landscapes, apart from having something to do with noise. And the only reason Stawarska-Beavan’s video installation Who/Wer is included must be because it features a poetic narrative and exaggerated sounds of a city scene, which by the same measure could have put any arthouse film from the past 90 years in the running.

But it does provide moments in which to reflect. Because Eyene has adopted a multi-faceted approach to sound art, Sounds Like Her is quieter than you’d expect. The incessant, headache-inducing squeals and beeps in such work as Haroon Mirza’s are kept to a minimum here. There’s time to stand still with Sun Kim and reflect on how sound envelopes our existence even when we are not listening. And Bailey’s immersive soundscape of women attempting to sing that A-flat note is soothing. Across a dark room, their voices wash over me, inviting me to add my voice to the chorus. I harmonise until the sound engineer comes back into the room.

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