Without a frame to circumscribe it, enquiries into the relationship between sound and memory are often speculative and open-ended. Taking this into mind, curator Bhavisha Panchia explores aurality and its kinship to memory, transmission, fiction and speculation.
Stories and myths mutate and are embellished as they travel across oceans and between people, and speak to the possibilities of sound to propagate lineages of history and knowledge into the present and future. This series of investigations will depart from an anecdote noted in Achmat David’s The Mosques of the Bo-Kaap, wherein he describes the azaan of Imam Tuan Guru travelling extraordinary distances from the first and oldest mosque in South Africa, the Auwal Mosque in Cape Town.
– Bhavisha Panchia, 2020
A4’s Course of Enquiry invites curators to develop a six-month programme centred on ‘making public’ their modes of investigation.
Course of Enquiry offers insight into research as process, with all the attendant segues and obstacles necessary to the curatorial form. Curators’ engagements with their guiding questions are observed and documented through a programme that considers the journey of ideas, from experimentation to expression. Where are the meanderings, the dead-ends, the points at which thoughts coalesce? How might this unfolding be made apparent? In the spirit of ‘elastic rigour’ (to use Carlo Ginzberg’s term), the accompanying translations of curatorial process – be they aural, written, visual or tactile – are guided by the individual enquiries, their outcomes anticipated but as yet unknown.
The resulting research and its traces are shared with the public in a series of events, texts and multimedia offerings.