Super sonic exploration

Peace in an Open Space is the first sound art exhibition to be held in the UAE. Anna Seaman speaks to the curator and explains the strangely immersive experience.

A visitor listens to the audio tracks supplied on an IPad to visitors of the UAE's first sound art exhibition being held at DUCTAC in Mall Of The Emirates. Antonie Robertson / The National

In the space of two hours, you can go from the sounds of an alternative orchestra made from the sirens of factories in Moscow, played during the sixth anniversary celebrations of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Red Square, to religious ritual music recorded in Cairo in the 1940s. Finally, you can travel to 2006 and listen to an eerily hypnotic piece of musical art made from the electronic pulses of the billboards in New York’s Times Square.

It is part history lesson, part art exhibition and a fully immersive experience for the senses. This is Peace in an Open Space, the first exhibition dedicated solely to sound art in the UAE and it runs at the Gallery of Light in Dubai’s Community Theatre & Arts Centre (Ductac) in Mall of the Emirates until the end of the weekend.

Most of the pieces are on a tablet device that you pick up upon entering and can select at will. The works vary in length from four to 45 minutes, meaning this is not an exhibition you can rush. There are pieces of vintage furniture from J+A design gallery placed in the space to allow you comfort while listening.

The longest, most compelling piece is Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room. Lucier is an American composer who, in 1969, conducted an experiment with his speaking voice, repeating the same sentence continually in a room until the resonant frequencies of that room completely distorted his voice. He explains the purpose of it within the piece: “What you will hear, then,” he says, “are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”

Lucier, who stutters and is attempting a kind of speech therapy as well as art, is considered a pioneer for this groundbreaking piece – and the effect of the aural decay is slow but compelling.

Simon Coates, the curator and the gallery manager at Ductac, says as much in his introductory essay for the show and then further explains its significance.

“For sound art, I Am Sitting in a Room is equivalent to Picasso’s Weeping Woman in the history of painting,” he says. “It was completely revolutionary. I didn’t think there was any way of getting it in the show, but at the last minute, he replied to my emails and so we included it.”

It is pieces such as this, Coates continues, as well as the intriguing Symphony of Factory Sirens and Halim El-Dabh’s The Expression of Za’ar that make this exhibition an introduction to sound art and an attempt to explain its function as a genre. The Symphony of Factory Sirens is a reproduction of an original performance by the Russian composer Arseny Avraamov, who is considered to be the first person to conceive that music did not have to come from a traditional orchestra and could, in fact, come from the sounds of factories, warships or cannons.

El-Dabh’s piece is the manipulated recording of a za’ar (religious possession) ­ceremony in Cairo on a wire recorder (a precursor to the tape recorder). He then re-recorded it and added effects, reversed it and generally exploited the malleability of the recorded sound.

The piece is impressive, says Coates, because El-Dabh “was alone in his pursuits and without the surrounding support system of a pervading international art scene”.

Christina Kubisch’s Homage With Minimal Disinformation has been made from recordings using special headphones that Kubisch used to pick up the sounds of the electromagnetic fields from flashing neon advertisements, LED tickers and light signs all around Times Square, composing them into a track that is surprisingly easy to listen to.

The exhibition lacks the traditional visuals you would expect from an art show, but there are some accompanying photographs and video works, as well as a wall-mounted essay by Marc Weidenbaum, who runs disquiet.com, a website which curates and collates unusual sonic material.

“Although there are few sound artists here, this region is friendly to the listening experience and I’m hoping this exhibition encourages people to experiment with sound art – or at least to discover more,” says Coates.

• Peace in an Open Space runs until Sunday at Ductac in Mall of the Emirates. For more information, call 04 341 4777 or visit www.ductac.org