eye
below
ear runs from March 22 until June 8 2025 at Kunsthal Mechelen. The U-shaped galleries of Kunsthal Mechelen host several audio and light installations, spatial interventions, and a video. There are performances with and without performers. There are senders and receivers. There is poetry. You can see/hear an interplay of music, voices, flashing lights, and alternating colours, mediated through different contemporary/anachronistic technologies. These technologies contribute an additional layer of materiality that is of interest here, besides direct meaning. Or rather, it is a question of the meaning that goes beyond semantics—one that emerges in distortion, dissonance, and disfluency.
The works adopt/interfere with the technical, spatial, and communicational infrastructures of the exhibition. A non-exhaustive list of materials present includes castor wheels, Dayton audio exciters, door stoppers, Engels boxes, miscellaneous light bulbs, and raw plasterboard. A non-exhaustive list of techniques and procedures applied includes amplification, analogue-to-digital conversion, digital-to-analogue conversion, repetition, scoring, sequencing, subtraction by addition, translation, and transposition.
The exhibition is composed in a way where works of different durations occur at deliberate intervals and, at times, simultaneously. Some are continuous, some repeat several times a day, and some occur only once in three months. The intervals are articulated through breaks, cavities, clearings, pauses, and volumes that are part of the individual works and of the composition as a whole. There are gaps in architecture that have bearing on the flow of bodies and gaps in bodies that bear on the flow of architecture. Holes in sound and holes that produce sound. Sounds bridging temporal distances.
In this space, ‘absence and presence never work as mere oppositions.’ [1] Consider that an interval of sound is worth as much as an interval of silence. Time makes no distinction between the two. When composing, the composer writes silences into the score the way the dramaturg writes them into the script, the way the writer writes them into the text… ‘Working with intervals means working with relationships.’ [2]
eye
below
ear speaks to the politics and poetics inherent in the relationship between sound, body, and temporality, and particularly their variants deemed non-normative by the linguistic, medical, economic, and social frameworks. Inspired by the title of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s 1985 essay ‘Ear Below Eye’ [3], the exhibition’s title enacts a flip, not to assert a hierarchy but to demonstrate how the meaning of the title may change depending on its mode of transmission: as text, image, or speech. Anticipating the tactics used in the exhibition, the title embraces errancy and opaqueness as generative forces. A discordance exists between what the title communicates visually and textually. When spoken, it allows for a wealth of meanings to arise from the potential confusion of ‘eye’ with ‘I’, or ‘below’ with ‘bellow’. The title also evokes an image of a rearranged physiognomy, which resonates with those works in the show that explore bodily intermediation/ transformation/substitution.
[1, 2] Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘The Undone Interval with Annamaria Morelli’, 1996.
[3] Later republished as ‘Holes in the Sound Wall’, 1991.
