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A Curatorial Ear
Rhythming the museum after hours with public programming
Anabelle Lacroix
This practice-based PhD project investigates how public programs create sonic situations at night by animating the public sphere with conversations, performances, and audio artworks as social events.
Public programming is often seen as just entertainment incompatible with the curatorial that has rarely considered events outside of exhibition formats. This limited view does not consider how public programs yield artistic work, challenging ideas and public interaction. Further, it negatively impacts the presentation of live arts and discourse in the gallery. This research proposes instead that curating after-hours public programs creates vital time zones for transforming the museum with the public, by listening for alternative knowledge making and critical practice.
Combining scholarship in curatorial and sound studies, this research demonstrates that programming enables resistance against the drive for spectacle and consensus in the gallery. Through a series of curated projects, Freedom of Sleep (2021), Radio Insomnia (2023) and Night at Centre Pompidou (2024), I develop sonic curatorial methods through rhythming and listening. These projects foster responsiveness by using radio as a social medium and staging research in public. I employ the curatorial ear to listen across activities and all sounds of the institution: literally to voices, to public responses and concerns, noises, and conceptually to contexts, rhythms, absences and the specificities of communities to shape curatorial work.
Drawing on the work of Sarah Ahmed, Tanja Dreher, Brandon Labelle and Kate Lacey, I argue that the curator has a central role in negotiating audibility to shape who has a voice in the art institution. Curating over years and all-night, I demonstrate that temporal strategies such as duration, recurrence and time dilation create alternative rhythms out of synch with normative and expedient cultures. By emphasising night-time’s qualities for learning, empowerment and liminal experiences, the research further demonstrates that listening holds the curatorial accountable; a curatorial ear means listening with, and against, the institution.
University of New South Wales, Sydney
School of Art, Design and Architecture
2025