Hear/Here
Hear/Here
Hear/Here was the first joint exhibition by prelingually d/Deaf photo-video-installation artist Katrina Garvey and hearing photo-video-projection artist Lisa Kurtz. The exhibition brought together site-specific works by each artist, in conversation with one another.
Audism privileges hearing and spoken language, positioning hearing experience as the norm. Hear/Here considered how hearing and d/Deaf experience presents different opportunities in perception.
In developing their individual works for the exhibition, the artists explored ideas about the unknown and ‘other’. Building on these themes already present in the artists practices Hear/Here works to create a reciprocation between hearing/not hearing, knowing/not knowing, without collapsing the differences between them.
As there is nothing inherent in a space that makes it deaf or hearing, the exhibition produces a temporary porous space between cultures. Moving between the works, the audience becomes intermediaries between the cultures, actors in the experience of other ways of knowing.
Artist Statement: Lisa Kurtz
We began with the question of whether we can ever fully know one another’s sensory experience. Could we use our practices to move towards greater understanding.
Recognising the limits of my own perception, I became interested in what happens when familiar relationships between sound, image and place are interrupted.
The work stays with uncertainty rather than trying to resolve it. Hearing is one sensory position among many, not a neutral or universal one.
The acoustics of place
The work withholds the sounds a hearing body might expect from these scenes. Without them, these places become less certain.
Lisa Kurtz, 2023
Looped digital video, no sound
The acoustics of place went on to be a finalist in the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney 2023
Installation photo credit: Tammy Law
Ocean, channel
Separating the ocean from its assumed sound, placing the senses on separate channels. They never align, as the sound wave is of an unrelated conversation. The work unsettles the assumption that sound confirms or completes understanding.
Lisa Kurtz, 2023
Looped digital video, no sound
Artist Talk
Photo credits: Joe Ruckli