Uncanny Knowledge: Unsettling the Architectures of Silencing

Co-curated by Elham Puriya Mehr and Fereshte Moosavi, Uncanny Knowledge: Unsettling the Architectures of Silencing is a two-day international assembly at Nottingham Contemporary that brings together artists, researchers, and communities to explore the potentialities of sound, vibration, listening, and embodiment as forces of resistance, collective knowledge-making, and social transformation.

Emerging amid escalating wars, forced displacements, ecological devastation, and worsening global crises, Uncanny Knowledge examines the architectures of silencing as forceful, interconnected economic, geopolitical, genocidal, and ideological matters. From the destruction of civilian infrastructures to the suppression of dissent and the erasure of cultural memory, silencing extends beyond the restriction of speech to the dismantling of the spaces and relations that sustain collective life. Within these conditions, the Assembly explores how sound, through its vibrational and relational potential, might mobilise suppressed hopes and traumatised memories, opening possibilities for resistance, alternative knowledges, and the reimagining of communal life.

Uncanny Knowledge approaches sound not merely as a medium of expression, but as a relational and transformative force capable of unsettling established regimes of knowledge and activating possibilities that remain unheard, unrecognised, or unrealised. Through vibration and embodied listening, the Assembly asks: How might artistic practices mobilise what has been silenced? And what forms of knowledge emerge when bodies become sites for resonance?

Through public performative presentations and collective conversations, the Assembly invites local and international participants to explore how sonic encounters might generate alternative forms of knowledge while opening spaces for collective imagination from which new futures might emerge.

Programme:

Day One
Sat 7 Nov, 11am-5pm

Silence and love as a resistance to being heard wrong
Salomé Voegelin (Writer, researcher and practitioner)

This is a curatorial performance, which means it is a presentation that does not read a paper but performs ideas by playing sounds and reciting poetry; by reading texts and proposing we perform text-scores, moving and standing still. Using this format I aim to work with the notion of uncanny knowledge in relation to silence, being silenced and love. I will consider the notion of silence not as a means to be inaudible but to be audible otherwise. This is a response to the volume of power occupying all legible frequencies and thus determining authority, rationality and truth. When silence, as an allegory for the not heard rather than the not sounding, can offer another possibility: moving sidewise, and off track, into a different expression and another language, which can also be loud.

I will use love as an irrational force of being together to try and imagine such a language, from the distillate of our being as always being irrational rather than being reduced to definition and measurement, semantic expectations and political grammars, historically identified and geographically placed.

Relational Listening
Golnoosh Heshmati (Artist, researcher, and curator)

In this presentation, Golnoosh Heshmati will elaborate on two main threads evolving around different ways of adopting listening methodologies in her practice. One reflects on a personally entangled exploration of a research project that emerged over the past few years through questioning, engaging, distancing, and coming close in relation to the building she grew up in, in Tehran. The latter part of the presentation will introduce Khamoosh, focusing on a collaborative and community-driven artistic research project evolving and gathering around sound and listening.

What Is Left to Listen to Now is the title of Golnoosh Heshmati's recent artistic research project, which has partly evolved into a sound installation and performance. In this presentation, she will share the research through storytelling, tracing processes of listening, unlearning, and performing the everyday archives encountered throughout the project. The work examines how the "disturbed ecologies" of personal life, intertwined with the social and political landscape of recent decades, manifest in relationships with the structures we inhabit, from the buildings we live in to our own bodies. Bones and pipes, trunks and roots: each carrying movements and resistances that form haunted landscapes, patterns that persist and repeat, while also seeking a way to break free.

Flood/Fume
Salar Mameni (Artist, art historian and educator) - Joining online

In this talk, Salar Mameni discusses the extreme heat waves, flooding and cyclones that have affected the southern coastal regions of Pakistan, with the most recent flood occurring in summer 2022, through the work of the contemporary Pakistani artist Zahra Malkani. The talk centers Malkani’s soundscapes and multi-media visual/textual presentations of spiritual, activist, and mourning practices of coastal communities in the Makran region of Balochestan as an entry point into a conversation about climate disasters, extractive economies, aesthetic practices, and the current war in the Persian Gulf. Through the notion of the “oceanic feeling,” a term Malkani uses for her audio-visual recordings, Mameni discusses the significance of sound and Zikr for spiritual and political work of memory making. The presentation focuses on water as an elemental carrier of sound and hence the talk offers water as a sonic event that holds history and memory together. In Malkani's sonic artistic practice with communities along the Makran coast, water is also held to be sacred and the dwelling of syncretic gods. Mameni's talk asks about the place of these sacred waterways in the context of militarized geological disasters in the Gulf region. Can the sacred and the disastrous coexist and what do the polluted geologies hold in their geo-historical memories?

Day Two
Sun 8 Nov, 11am- 5pm

ThruMmming with Knowledge
Irit Rogoff (Theorist, educator, and curator)

My subject is the conjunction of ‘research, ‘knowledge Production’ and ‘creative Practice’ as we are seeing it unfold today across so many art forms. To try and capture the synchronicity of embodied processes of knowledge production, of how research is lived out rather than utilised, I am addressing the work of dancer and choreographer Arkady Zaides. The notion of thruMmming I am in search of is both epistemic and embodied. It’s a form of ‘Being with Knowledge’ that does not reach conclusions or seal knowledge off temporally within known disciplinary economies, it is an understanding of Jean-Luc Nancy’s insistence that “We are Meaning”.

Zaides works under the rubric of “Documentary Choreography’ This term refers to a type of choreographic work that incorporates documents (such as interviews, testimonies, video materials, archival information, etc.) as sources of factual information which can be used to question and intervene in social and political realities.

Even more invested in an investigation of gestural codes, and not just political rhetoric, is Zaides' Archive of 2014, a work in collaboration with ‘B’Tselem: Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories’ .

The Unheard Call of the Nakba
Ayreen Anastas & René Gabri (Artists and researchers) - Joining online

There are moments in shared existence where everything seems revocable, because it must. What is a calling, a vocation? And what is a recalling, a re-vocation? How did the urgent call of Palestine not get heard in its many iterations? What does Palestine call for? How did art, music, film respond to this call? Can we speak of the silence or the silencing of artists as it pertains to the Nakba? Can we recall this call? Can we revoke the vocations of art in the planetary regime that formed to perpetrate the Nakba? If the Nakba has been as much an aesthetic regime as it has been political, economic, juridical, martial, educational, psychological, cultural … what have been and continue to be the forces obstructing our capacity to hear this call? What if noise is a greater threat than silence for charting our ways out of the genocidal culture that was imposed in the name of ‘after’ committing Nakba? What does struggle, yet alone art look and sound like on the paths of abolishing all that stands for the perpetration and denial of ongoing Nakba?

Khamoshi Behtar: Sight and Sound of Silence
Hamid Dabashi (Writer, educator and researcher) - Joining online

The word khamush in Persian is a quite strange word. It means both (1) to turn a light off so it becomes dark and (2) to stop talking so one becomes silent. So that khamush means both silent and dark. Khamosh ey ashegh e majnun — Rumi says in a famous ghazal, “Be quiet oh bewitched lover . . .” Meanwhile the phrase “Cheragh ha ra man khamush mikonam/I turn off the lights “ is the title of a vastly popular contemporary novel by Zoya Pirzad. So the same word khamush means both to become silent and to turn off the light and not for darkness. The word thus embodies a decisively bold claim on a phenomenology of sight and sound that can only become evident when one pauses speaking or stops seeing and becomes quiet and dark. But, and thus the paradox of the mixed and uncanny metaphor, the silence is full of sound and that darkness is full of visual commotions. This paradox was perhaps best captured in Parviz Tanavoli’s now legendary series of sculptures known as Heech/Nothing, which frightfully captured just about everything.

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Access

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This event will be held in The Space.

Speakers will use microphones.

This event is wheelchair accessible.

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