ICA LIVE ART FESTIVAL | Beyond Objects: The Sonic Poetics of Collections

For ‘Beyond Objects: The Sonic Poetics of Collections’, the idea is to reimagine the objective of collections and museums beyond their display of material objects; secondly, to broaden the focus of cultural conservation beyond solely preserving the material integrity of their collected objects. Here, we challenge these narrow objectives and performatively argue for one that contributes further to the knowledge systems and the social significance of material objects housed within the ideological and physical frameworks of these institutions. From the Kirby Collection of Musical Instruments situated at the College of Music, UCT, Kolawole Gbolahan will curate a listening session and an informed auditory experience of musical instruments housed in the collection. This is equally a curated performance of the sonic and a lived curatorial approach to bring together audiences (i.e., music/other students at UCT, as well as ICA festival attendees. Thus, within this sonically produced social space, we are able to tap into other ways of engaging musical instruments housed in collections – ways that amplify our imagination of sound-producing material culture beyond static objects hung on walls or trapped in narrow ideas of the indigenous.