Curating Narratives, Sensing Their Meaning

How Tuning into Our Environment Inspires Meaningful Art

Guest Article by Rim Irscheid

What do we think, feel, hear, and see in our mind’s eye when we think about Beirut? As a researcher examining curatorial narratives on the SWANA region and Lebanon in particular, I am often confronted with post-war and protest sound and imagery, centering resistance in the visual, and resistance narratives attached to sound from the city. No doubt, Lebanese musicians have encountered decades marked by the civil war, a horrific explosion, harsh lockdowns, and regional conflicts. Many artists such as Lina Ghaibeh, Mazen Kerbaj, and George Khoury (Jad) expressed their experiences of pain, fear, resilience, and identity in sound works, visual arts, memoirs, and graphic novels.

Nevertheless, politically charged narratives and decisions in the curatorial realm of sound in Euro-American exhibition contexts, e.g., sensationalist fixations on music as resistance, have long shaped our knowledge of the region and are likewise a factor that keeps alive binary notions of tradition and modernity. Looking at music and art that is influenced, but not defined, by the environment from which it emerges, reveals the very process of cultural production in times of crisis. It makes us reflect on the interdisciplinary nature of art in urban centres, and methods of translation, that artists use to put their experiences into tangible mediums and textures.

In the field of contemporary sound and installation art from Beirut, artists such as Cynthia Zaven and Jad Atoui have translated the variety of experiences and biographical details into different textures for listeners and viewers inside and outside of Lebanon to experience. These methods included data, words, images, sound, material objects that help us to understand the way citizens interact with their urban environment on a sensory level.

Speaking to Beirut-based artist Cynthia Zaven whose work will be shown at Kunstraum Walcheturm as part of this year’s SONIC MATTER festival, I learned that good curators and good musicians are those generous with their listening – a topic which she addressed when discussing the real-time composition «12 Districts» with Ensemble Modern, a piece based on the map of Beirut’s 12 districts that served as a tool to create a conversation between the different soundscapes of the city. To be able to listen carefully to our environment helps us to distinguish noise from sound and situate sound and image in a context and build an accessible narrative around it:

«It all starts with the ear: being aware of your surroundings, you open yourself to different possibilities, different narratives, different realities. So, learning how to listen is key. Not only for musicians, but for anyone. In essence, the more generous you are with your listening, the greater your understanding of your surroundings will be.»

Jad Atoui’s work tells us how it is not the political environment per se, but the way we choose to engage with it through the choice of medium (e.g., video installation, sound installation, electroacoustic composition, etc.) and the format’s respective narrational capacities that enable different forms of listening and sensory experience of the narrative the artist chooses to tell. Avenues that were explored in the Beirut art scene are utopias and imaginations of alternative futures alongside art that stresses reclaiming raw materials such as wood, metal, and brass as sonic transmitters. In his installation «Trigger», commissioned by Beirut Art Center, Jad Atoui shows how experiencing protest sounds through physical and visual vibrations makes the sound qualities of storytelling more accessible to listeners.

The same is true for his installation «Vibrant Pools» (2023), co-commissioned by Irtijal Festival. The project is inspired by his work in Vienna’s deaf community that prompted the artists to engage haptic and other sensory experiences of listening. The piece that involves vibrating vases and cymbals of which each has their own resonance and pitch. The transducers underneath amplify these surfaces which allows for the texture of the sound to change according to the material you place on the disc.

Contemporary art and sound works can make us understand how listening helps us to cultivate a deeper connection with our surroundings. But it is the method of translation that enables us to understand sound and its political and cultural context, given our willingness to listen generously.

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