2020

If I don’t Look You in the Eye

Framework:
the affectable body
Title:
If I don’t Look You in the Eye
Year:
2020
Collaborator(s):
Shobun Baile
Material:
sample of Noam Chomsky in “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media” (1992), spoken word, field recordings, extracts of “It Ain’t Necessarily So” in “Porgy and Bess” (1958) by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, extracts and translation of “Über das Geistige in der Kunst” (1912) by Wassily Kandinsky, Graphic Composition #1 (vinyl print, 230 x 230 cm | 90 x 90 in)
Technique:
sound installation
Dimensions:
variable
Duration:
21 minutes
Production:
commissioned by the 2020 Fotofest Biennial
Image:
installation view, leo with Shobun Baile, African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other, 2020
Credit:
photo by Emily Peacock, courtesy of FotoFest

In this collaborative work, Noam Chomsky’s address to an unseen audience operates as a platform to examine the relation between abstraction and contemporary modes of representation. The sound composition combines field recordings of the exhibition space, music, and spoken word to complicate the idea of black as a color and blackness as an antonym of light, exposing the epistemic and aesthetic violence embedded in such formulations.

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