Thesis title:
Sound as Cultural Artefact (CDA)
I am a curator, sound archivist, and AHRC-funded PhD researcher. For 20 years I’ve worked with sound; preserving and interpreting sound recordings and curating spaces to experience sound archives in connection with their political, social, and cultural contexts. I’ve worked across formats, publishing my research as radio broadcasts, vinyl records, archive catalogues, academic and curatorial writing, and through exhibitions, listening sessions, and lectures.
In my practice-based PhD in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies — a Collaborative Doctoral Award at the University of Nottingham with Nottingham Contemporary — I develop my curatorial practice into a research method to examine how artists critically engage with sound recordings, sound archives, and their colonial history. My doctoral thesis expands Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen, an exhibition and live programme I curated at Nottingham Contemporary (31 May – 7 September 2025), into a discursive space, attending to how the artists and artworks featured listen to sound as a carrier of history and create epistemic spaces for sounds that have been censored, muted, rendered inaudible, and excluded from official archives.
Interpreting new commissions is central to the thesis, for example Satch Hoyt’s ‘un-muting’ of African instruments held in European ethnographic museums, Dylan Robinson’s sound composition reflecting on Indigenous conceptions of listening, and the return of sound archives through composition, and the collective reimagining of a Taiwanese sugar-cane worker’s protest song in the work of Hong-Kai Wang.
Drawing on sound studies, art history, and curatorial theory, I argue that artworks, such as those featured in Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen, offer new modes of recording and preserving sound, therefore engaging with history through sound beyond colonial technologies of recording and capture. In this way, and following Acosta López’s understanding of artworks as capable of introducing ‘new frameworks of meaning (“grammars”) through which we may be able to bring the unheard of into audibility,’ I argue that they offer both a challenge to the unexamined trust in the authority of sound recordings and by extension, sound archives, and a generative way to make sense of recorded history (2024, p. 398).
Research Area
Publications
Book chapters
Journal articles
Curatorial publications
Reviews
Discography
Conferences
- Talk 'Artists and Sound Archives: Renée Green's Import/Export Funk Office' at Music Department Research Colloquia Series, University of Nottingham, 26 November 2024. (more info)
- Presented paper 'Encountering archival sound in exhibitions' within panel Sustaining Signals: Sounding the Curatorial at Congress 2024, McGill University, Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, 13 June 2024 (postponed by organisers).
- Co-presented paper 'Rhythms of Venezuela: the re-materialisation of folklore' with Carlos Colmenares at Critical Perspectives on Petrosonics, Royal Musical Association (RMA) and British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE), King’s College London, 11 May 2023.
Public Engagement & Impact
Exhibitions
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Co-curated Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen, a thematic group exhibition and associated live programme at Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, UK), 31 May - 7 September 2025. (more info)
Invited talks and guest lectures
- Guest lecture 'Notes on Curating Sound' for MFA Sound Arts, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (London, UK), May 2026.
- Moderated 'In Conversation: Onyeka Igwe & Test Dept' as part of Assembly 2026, Somerset House (London, UK), March 2026 (more info).
- Contribution to 'Research Night: Through Sounds - Clipping 2: sum, parts', Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), February 2026 (more info).
- 'Listening session & talk: Andrea Zarza Canova with Raheel Khan' as part of Memory Police exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA (London, UK), November 2025 (more info).
- Guest lecture 'Curating sound archives' in MFA Curating workshop, Goldsmiths, University of London (London, UK), November 2024.
- Walkthrough of exhibition Julian Abraham 'Togar': REꓘONCILIATION, Nottingham Contemporary, June 2024 (more info).
- Listening session 'Plant the seed to harvest the song' as part of The Listening Affect, Galeria Municipal do Porto (Portugal), November 2023 (more info).
Radio
- Produced radio series Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen for NTS Radio exploring the themes, artworks and artists featured in the exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, May 2025 (more info).
- Interview discussing research at Fonoteca Municipal do Porto (Portugal), November 2023 (more info).
Residencies and workshops
- Workshops with Shieldfield Youth Programme as part of exhibition Resounding Diasporic Sonic Worlds, The NewBridge Project (Newcastle, UK), May 2025 (more info).
- Residency at Fonoteca Municipal do Porto (Portugal), November 2023.
Other Research Interests
- Energy Humanities
- Philosophy
- Ethnomusicology
- Psychoanalysis
Memberships
- Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association
- The Paul Mellon Centre's Doctoral Research Network
- ICOM UK (International Council of Museums UK)
- ICTM (International Council of Traditional Music) Study Group on Sources and Archives for Music and Sound Studies
