Muted Spaces, Resonant Bodies
Sound In Museums Conference - 2025 - Mafra, Portugal -
Sound In Museums Conference - 2025 - Mafra, Portugal -
Curated Bodily Wrongness
There was a time not long ago, before my mom and I knew we were autistic. A time before we knew how trauma, Complex PTSD, and autism directed our bodies a little differently than those around us.
I now understand how we stand is a little too close to the art on the walls. How when we speak it's a little too soft. And that I shut the door a little too heavily. How our desire to touch can precede the asked-for preservation of materials. How we laugh a little too loud, or whisper at just the wrong time.
We could feel the wrongness of our bodies in space and time, a wrongness that extends and is felt by so many in their own bodies in various ways. This wrongness is especially pronounced in art exhibition spaces: an issue of curation and institutional expectation. The particular strength of expectations of "rightness" in exhibition spaces makes this wrongness exist in the many, not just my mom and I.
This discomfort is so widely experienced that it becomes a primary focus in "Decolonizing Art Institutions: the Artists Book" (issue 34 of On Curating). In describing her experience at Lina Bo Bardi's Museo de Arte de São Paulo, Maria Thereza Alves explains how her mother was terrified to enter—certain the guards would shout at them to leave, dragging her feet even after they'd bought tickets, whispering that they wouldn't be allowed inside. The fear of public embarrassment, of not belonging, held her back even at the threshold.
It's a feeling so many of us are familiar with in art curatorial spaces. Of feeling like we don't belong. It is readily apparent that this is because of classist, elitist expectations. What I think is less noted is the specific tangibilities in which this becomes apparent, and that's what I will be addressing today.
Giovanna Bragaglia asks: "Museums have, or at least should have, very different aims; however, how can they continue using the same structure as before? There is a need to rethink its nature as a social space, as a space of representation, observation, display, and regulation. How to build a place that people are not afraid of? How to engage people to be part of it? In order to make contemporary art more open to the world, perhaps the solution is to try to transform it into a home, where visitors and artists are not received as numbers or even guests, but in a place that they can feel at home."
While I share many of the same questions, I don't particularly desire to make it home. It assumes too much about home and comfort, and assumes too little of non-private and public spaces as inherently uncomfortable. It is for this reason I point to bodily wrongness versus discomfort. Many growings and learnings are deeply uncomfortable. So instead, I ask: how can we create these spaces to be ones in which we can engage art? And we cannot engage art if we are so restrained, so restricted, that we cannot be affected, responsive, and moved.
Art as Movement - An Emotive Force
I used to dread entering these spaces. Not because of their starkness, but because of how watched I felt, how restricted. Body physically tightening.
A particularly memorable moment: many years ago, my body crumpled in uncontrollable, body-vibrating sobs, echoing the cries of the song sung in Shirin Neshat's Turbulent. The screens and screams cocooned me in a dark museum room, eliciting immense grief. I later learned this was a PTSD response that the work had triggered.
I am deeply grateful to this terrifying experience. Grateful because it shifted grief that had stoppered inside for so long that I now will spend the rest of my life uncovering it. I was physiologically impacted by this emotional and emotive experience.
But I was not only moved to uncover grief—I was also moved, externally re-oriented, by the pressures of the institutional space. At The Broad, though it is not specific to just this institution, I turned away from the artwork and fled.
What is art but an empty aesthetic object if when it speaks to us, we cannot respond? If we are embarrassed? An emotive body can be silent, struck with awe. But it can also make sound. Sobs.
Art is like the tides in that it moves us, lifts us, and takes us with it. An outside force often outside of our control. The stifling hums of our vagus nerve, the squeaking pacing steps—the way we have constricted our museum spaces is in resistance to our own metronomic tides.
We need to create embodied curations that allow the tides to move us. In order to do this, we need to prioritize other forms of engaging art beyond the silent gaze. While there is use for silence at times, the decibel level in many museums—particularly in NYC—is that of a scream held in.
The tides move us in waves, rocking us to and fro in the rhythms we use to soothe babies, the paths our feet walk when we pace. My mom does this already. Her feet tap in rhythms. It does not stop when she sleeps, which as a nervous child would drive me crazy.
But First: What Is Art?
Art is defined by its relationship between (sorry greek terms, they dont exist in english) poiesis (POY-ES-ISS), pathos, and tropē. Art historically has been so hard to define because it is defined by a moving relational network. Art is poiesis (poy-es-iss) that produces pathē (PAH-thay) through tropē (TROH-pay).
In poiesis, something is brought into being—whether shared publicly or experienced privately, the essential act is one of making, of creation. Often this is done via "thinking through things," where language or thought alone fall short and something must be made. Artistic poiesis differs from mere craft in its orientation: it aims toward pathos, toward affecting the experiencer.
Pathē are not emotions we choose but states that seize us—bodily, visceral, involuntary responses to what stands before us. We are acted upon, moved, impressed. Yet the pathē (PAH-thay) of art aren't arbitrary sensations. They operate through tropē: art turns us, redirects our consciousness, reorients our understanding.
Where a utilitarian object—like my coffee mug I sit and drink from as I wrote this—confirms existing patterns (the mug delivers coffee as expected), art disrupts and redirects, though not always in constance. It is, like the tides, moving us. It uncovers what was hidden while simultaneously guiding us toward new territories of experience. Art, then, is making that which moves us by turning us—poiesis producing pathē through tropē.
A very clear example is Duchamp's urinal. Duchamp brings something into being—not by traditional making (sculpting, painting), but by selecting and recontextualizing. The act of signing "R. Mutt," the sculptor (as so many urinals are or were made), titling it Fountain, and submitting it to an exhibition is the creative gesture. The poiesis here is conceptual displacement.
Viewers undergo something visceral: the collision between "sacred or elite art space" and "hidden bathroom fixture" creates a bodily, intellectual jolt.
This is where Fountain becomes genuinely artistic rather than mere provocation. It turns your understanding—it reorients what counts as art, what counts as creation, where aesthetic value resides. You can't look at art the same way after encountering it. It redirects consciousness from "art = skilled handcraft producing beauty" toward "art = framing, context, concept, questioning." The urinal doesn't just shock—it pivots the entire discourse, makes you face a different direction.
"Art is the world talking back." (Chus Martinez in “What is Art” in Ten Fundamentals of Curating.
Emotive Ambient Sounds
The silences in most art exhibit spaces, curatorial spaces, museums, emphasize the sounds that are present. Stones caught in sneakers scrape across cement and wood floors. An old man's phone rings. His zipper unzipping as he scrambles—a little too slowly, albeit frantically—to silence it. Voices are hushed. Parents shush their children. People talk in whispers, always whispers. Ambient sounds outside of the art are stifled.
Sara Ahmed writes in The Cultural Politics of Emotions: "Emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time, as well as through orientations towards and away from others."
My embodied response to Turbulent was an emotional one. The difference between a physiological and an emotional response is inextricable. The surface of my body was affected—pathē seized me. This is not only the flushed red as I cried or the scrunching of my face, but also the directional push to turn the surfaces of my body away. To turn. To stifle. Emotions are policed via social expectation.
Ahmed continues: "It is not difficult to see how emotions are bound up with the securing of social hierarchy: emotions become attributes of bodies as a way of transforming what is 'lower' or 'higher' into bodily traits... Bodies take the shape of the very contact they have with objects and others."
And we are terrified of the power this has—to unite, to divide, to motivate, to inspire. What if we emote anger, frustration, fear, grief, hysteria?
Emotive Ambient Sounds as "Lower"
The neutrality of so many curatorial spaces is, of course, not actually neutral. Sounds are often the most prominent signifiers of race, class, and gender in these rooms.
Emotions themselves are not neutral, just as the decibel from a Black American is interpreted as louder than that of a white American and a white american as louder than that of a White Frenchperson. It is not, of course, louder in any measured way. But it is perceived and symbolized as louder. So too are emotional expressions. Expressions of response to art—unless disdain, knowledge, prissiness, disgust, or stoicism—are generally, unless contained or private, considered lower than others. Unacceptable. Undesirable.
The Reverence of Sight
An epistemological foundation to our contemporary Western cultural knowing is categorization and therefore prioritization of sight. This Westernized epistemology has permeated academics worldwide. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí discusses this in her book The Invention of Women, in which she demonstrates that the category of "women" does not foundationally exist in Yoruba understanding. Even academic understanding of "third gender" is an imposition of categorical differentiation founded in our own social structuring rather than indigenous ones.
She writes: "The reason that the body has so much presence in the West is that the world is primarily perceived by sight. The differentiation of human bodies in terms of sex, skin color, and cranium size is a testament to the powers attributed to 'seeing.' The gaze is an invitation to differentiate. Different approaches to comprehending reality, then, suggest epistemological differences between societies."
This gaze extends to curation within exhibition spaces. Rather than engaging a multitude of senses, colloquially we go to museums to SEE. We "saw" the Mona Lisa, we saw Philip Guston at Hauser and Wirth. We do not smell, hear, taste, experience them.
And we certainly do not touch—perhaps the most heavily policed sense of all. Sophie Calle's Behind the Curtain offers a rare counter-example: viewers are invited to touch fabric to reveal what lies beneath. The work acknowledges that touch is part of knowing, part of being affected. Yet such invitations remain exceptional rather than foundational to how we design encounters with art.The 'Do Not Touch' sign is ubiquitous, understandable given preservation concerns, yet it further entrenches the primacy of the visual gaze. We are permitted only to look, as if sight alone could capture the full weight of art's capacity to affect us.
By limiting the other senses with false neutralities—for "no smell" is not neutral, “no vocalizations” are not neutral—a perspective, even in absences, is always on display. Our gaze becomes priority, eliminating the senses that may distract from it.
Alternate forms of exhibiting might not prioritize sight but a fuller bodymind experience, which might present very differently. There may be sound, conversation encouraged, gravelly footsteps, extensive seating—sporadic or gathered. Currently, we don't provide much seating, as we hope to allow for quicker flow, not wanting too much lingering, fearing that the space may crowd the art or each other. This is not merely aesthetic preference—it's economic logic. Museums operate under pressure to maximize throughput, to move bodies efficiently through space, to protect objects for insurance purposes, to satisfy donor expectations of order and decorum. The institutional forces that keep these spaces silent and restrictive are material, not just ideological.
It's important to distinguish between the sounds OF museums and the sounds IN museums. Sounds IN museums are curated, permitted, often literally piped in as part of artworks or audio guides. Sounds OF museums—the scrape of shoes, the whispered conversations, the bodies moving through space—are treated as noise to be minimized. This distinction reveals the power structure: institutions, and those generally White Bodies who fund them, control which sounds matter, which sounds mean, and which sounds must be suppressed. The visitor's body becomes an unwelcome sound source.
Unruly Sound: The Sonic Color Line
Noise is the "Other." We categorize "noise" as sound that is socially and culturally undesired. Jennifer Lynn Stoever describes in detail in The Sonic Color Line: "The sonic color line [also] codifies sounds linked to racialized bodies—such as music and the ambient sounds of everyday living—as 'noise,' sound is a loud and unruly 'Other.' Noise is not merely loudness measured in decibels."
Like weeds in a suburban American lawn, a beautiful yellow dandelion is undesired only because we have said so. It is just as beautiful as a rose, ecologically more nurturing of the soil, and edible. Laughter in a museum is only uncomfortable because we have made it so. We expect a visual reverence.
Sound, ambient noise in exhibition spaces—even laughter, tears, and conversation—are supposedly a distraction to our visual exploration and engagement. Sound draws our attention away from seeing and toward listening. Sound in museums becomes noise. And noise is not heard equally. A Black voice is unjustly heard as louder than a white one.
Stoever points out that "certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst particular sounds." White bodies in particular expect silence, living in quieter neighborhoods, with soundproof walls, and a higher sense of the individual over the collective.
In a Westernized society in which visual categorizations remain hegemonically dominant, sound in particular becomes an unruly other, piercing the facade of civilization that rests so precariously on stacks of white canons and visual categorizations.
Noise becomes rap. It becomes laughter. It becomes whispers.
As amber jamilla musser writes: "Beyond its circulation in the sonic, noise is conceptually related to excess, abundance, and the unruly. Notably, these are terms that correlate closely with racist attempts to demean and police behavior (and, more often than not, mere existence) of people of color."
Art Moves—Movement Makes Sound
The sounds in the museum—those considered unruly or disruptive—are not only a cultural problem, but an institutional and curatorial issue. Expectations are not distributed equally. Noise becomes the monster that wakes us from the reveries of false normalcies and false neutralities.
The formation and purpose of exhibiting art has ebbed and flowed, and today through the practice of curation, art arranges artworks and their conditions of encounter. An exhibition space becomes a site for negotiating ideas and emotion—carried forward through art and artistic practices.
The conditions are as important as the art itself. Often, the conditions ontologically create art as itself and create our experience with it. Sometimes silence IS the reaction of our bodies, struck in awe. But what is needed is true permissioning—to bodily be with art. To allow its mobilizing, its destabilizing force. To allow pathē to operate through tropē.
Artists and curators increasingly occupy overlapping roles—many artists curate, many curators create. They share the work of creating conditions for encounter. Yet institutional pressures often override both artist intention and curatorial vision, defaulting to inherited conventions of silence and stillness.
Luca, presenting at this conference, uses the sounds of museum visitors themselves as tools of displacement - making audible what is usually suppressed, and in doing so, creating conditions where people feel more permitted to react. Notably, to me, he observes that the loudest moments in museums occur around children and around provocative works - moments when institutional control over bodily response temporarily falters, when pathē break through despite the architecture of silence.
As queer theorist Paul B. Preciado claims, the body exists as a "living political archive" that contains cultural and political records, narratives, and flows of power and technology. It moves beyond the biological body to encompass the body as a site of biopolitical management, subjectification, and resistance, shaped by social, technological, and political forces.
Successful Spaces
Fotografiska in NYC, before it closed, welcomed laughter and drink. Floors were carpeted blue and pink depending on the exhibit. And music played loudly for the [exhibit name], featuring a strip club in Atlanta.
I once heard a woman sharing with her child the history of the AIDS epidemic in the US during the Edges of Ailey exhibit at the Whitney Museum. This was somewhat facilitated by the loudness permitted by the curators because of his performances screened on the walls, with sound filling the entire floor.
Rirkrit Tiravanija's Untitled (Free) (1992) transformed 303 Gallery into a space where the artist cooked and served Thai curry to visitors. The work existed only in the eating, the conversation, the bodies gathered together. Sound, smell, taste, touch—all the senses suppressed in traditional exhibition—became the substance of the work itself.
Liu Chuang's Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony II enveloped viewers for 58 minutes in layered sonic storytelling—demanding time, attention, and care. This temporal commitment runs counter to the throughput logic of most museums, but it's essential for the work to produce its pathē, its turning.
There are so many ways to do this.
Designated "responsive zones" where sound/movement are explicitly welcomed
Private zones made of fabric that create rooms and fluttering
Scent, permeating the spaces with coffee, tea, or rose oil
Varied acoustic environments within single exhibitions
Seating arrangements that encourage lingering/processing
Signage that explicitly gives permission rather than restrictionI think the disability aspect would distract.
Toward Embodied Curation
If art is poiesis that produces pathē through tropē—if art is making that moves us by turning us—then our curatorial spaces must allow for that movement, that turning, that being-affected.
The question is not whether museums should be silent or loud, sparse or abundant. The question is: can we create conditions where pathē are permitted? Where the involuntary, somatic, psychic responses that art produces in us are not policed into silence, not shamed into stillness?
This requires:
Acknowledging that "neutrality" is a fiction that serves particular bodies over others
Recognizing that sound, movement, and emotive response are not distractions from art but often the evidence that art is working—that tropē is occurring
Understanding that the sonic color line operates in our exhibition spaces, coding certain bodies and their responses as "noise"
Creating multiple modes of engagement beyond the privileged gaze
When my body crumpled before Turbulent, that was not a failure of museum etiquette. That was art doing what art does: producing pathē that reorient us, that turn us toward what we have yet to discover. The failure was in the institutional pressure that made me flee rather than stay with that turning.
We need spaces where:
A mother can whisper AIDS history to her child without shame
Laughter at the absurdity or joy in art is welcomed
Bodies can pace, stim, move in rhythm with what moves them
Silence can still exist—but as one option among many, not as a mandate
Art speaks. The question is: will we create spaces where we're permitted to speak back?
Not every space needs to be the same. But every space should ask: who does this serve? Whose bodies are made wrong here? And what might we be missing when we silence the very responses that signal art's power—its capacity to move us, to turn us, to remake us?
The work is not to make museums comfortable. The work is to make them permissive of the discomfort, the grief, the joy, the reorientation that art demands of us.
Let the tides move. Let pathē operate. Let tropē turn us.
And let our spaces—finally—make room for bodies responding to art, not just gazing at it.
