Seeing Voices used MUMA’s collection as a springboard for thinking through the voice and how it is visualised, employed and reimagined in works of contemporary art. In the exhibition, the voice opened onto a multiplicity of concepts: as a metaphor for collective action; for speaking out against injustice and coming together in gestures of solidarity; a marker of cultural and geographic specificity; and a medium for conditioned colloquialisms. In this way, the voice can also function like a spiritual medium; through its recording and archiving it can time-travel, haunting the present as if a ghost from the past. The voice is also an index; a measure of position, perspective, distance and emotion. In private, in public, in conversation, on record—the voice connects our experiences with those of others.

Fayen d’Evie and Bryan Phillips were invited to devise an audio tour of Seeing Voices as it was installed at the first venue, Horsham Regional Art Gallery, and which was available at all the tour venues. The resulting audio tour navigated the sensory geography of the exhibition in that place at that time. D’Evie’s broader interest in navigating visual art for non-normative vision was expressed through a close, myopic reading of the artworks and with descriptions of the experience of the body in the space. This was intercut with listening meditations and the voices of people from the Horsham area who are blind or have low vision, with whom the artists had run a workshop, the first of its kind for the Gallery. The collaborative work created by d’Evie and Phillips includes ekphrastic description of works by Seeing Voices artists Damiano Bertoli, Erik Bünger, Catherine or Kate, Michael Cook, Léuli Eshraghi, Alicia Frankovich, Susan Hiller, Alex Martinis Roe, Angelica Mesiti, Clinton Nain and Rose Nolan.

The audiodescriptive recording, created during the first incarnation of the exhibition, opened accessibility to the exhibition throughout the life of its tour, as an educational resource and as a resource for vision impaired visitors, while also offering a consideration of the voice and its role in relation to knowledge and experience that echoes beyond the exhibition timeframe.

*This text is adapted from the exhibition summary composed by MUMA.

Audiodescriptive sound work, featuring myopic description and a participatory descriptive workshop.

Seeing Voices

This touring exhibition was developed by Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in collaboration with NETS Victoria. From 2017–19, the exhibition toured seven regional art museums across Australia.

Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Vic
Mildura Arts Centre, Vic
Cairns Regional Art Gallery, Qld
Riddoch Art Gallery, Mount Gambier, SA
Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, Tas
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW