The works adopt/interfere with the technical, spatial, and communicational infrastructures of the exhibition. A non-exhaustive list of materials present includes castor wheels, Dayton audio exciters, door stoppers, Engels boxes, miscellaneous light bulbs, and raw plasterboard. A non-exhaustive list of techniques and procedures applied includes amplification, analogue-to-digital conversion, digital-to-analogue conversion, repetition, scoring, sequencing, subtraction by addition, translation, and transposition.

The exhibition is composed in a way where works of different durations occur at deliberate intervals and, at times, simultaneously. Some are continuous, some repeat several times a day, and some occur only once in three months. The intervals are articulated through breaks, cavities, clearings, pauses, and volumes that are part of the individual works and of the composition as a whole. There are gaps in architecture that have bearing on the flow of bodies and gaps in bodies that bear on the flow of architecture. Holes in sound and holes that produce sound. Sounds bridging temporal distances.

In this space, ‘absence and presence never work as mere oppositions.’ [1] Consider that an interval of sound is worth as much as an interval of silence. Time makes no distinction between the two. When composing, the composer writes silences into the score the way the dramaturg writes them into the script, the way the writer writes them into the text… ‘Working with intervals means working with relationships.’ [2]

eye

below

ear speaks to the politics and poetics inherent in the relationship between sound, body, and temporality, and particularly their variants deemed non-normative by the linguistic, medical, economic, and social frameworks. Inspired by the title of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s 1985 essay ‘Ear Below Eye’ [3], the exhibition’s title enacts a flip, not to assert a hierarchy but to demonstrate how the meaning of the title may change depending on its mode of transmission: as text, image, or speech. Anticipating the tactics used in the exhibition, the title embraces errancy and opaqueness as generative forces. A discordance exists between what the title communicates visually and textually. When spoken, it allows for a wealth of meanings to arise from the potential confusion of ‘eye’ with ‘I’, or ‘below’ with ‘bellow’. The title also evokes an image of a rearranged physiognomy, which resonates with those works in the show that explore bodily intermediation/transformation/substitution.

“I’m Alicja Melzacka and I have the pleasure of working on the upcoming exhibition at Kunsthal Mechelen. For a few years now, I’ve been working as a curator and writer between Belgium and the Netherlands, and occasionally elsewhere, including Poland, where I originally come from. I always imagined I would become either a translator, writer, or artist, and I guess the way I understand what I do takes a bit from all of these disciplines.

I think what’s so great about exhibition-making is that it’s one of the few settings where you don’t have to communicate unequivocally. And I’m not talking about confusing text or speeches; I’m talking about polysemy — not only the possibility but the necessity of negotiating multiple meanings, and about how art can challenge our idea of what meaning is and where it can be found.”

— Alicja Melzacka

Sophie Fitze is Curatorial Fellow of Kunsthal Mechelen and worked alongside curator Alicja Melzacka, on the exhibition eye below ear. Sophie Fitze is a freelance curator and art worker based in Brussels. Navigating through practices that entangle language and body, she seeks to explore potentials of embodied experience and affects. She was a Curatorial Studies participant in 2022/2023 and graduated in Visual Arts from Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.

[1, 2] Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘The Undone Interval with Annamaria Morelli’, 1996.
[3] later republished as ‘Holes in the Sound Wall’, 1991.

City of Mechelen, Flemish Government, Mondriaan Fund, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Brussels, Austrian Cultural Forum Brussels, Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture Austria, The Cultural Department of the State of Styria, Hotel De 3 Paardekens, Academy Mechelen and Filmhuis Mechelen.