Shifting Center stages the process of listening to infrasonic landscapes, acoustic architectures, and unsounded instruments. The exhibition will comprise sculptural, moving-image, and spatial-audio installations presented throughout EMPAC’s concert hall, proscenium stage, and studios. 

A “shifting center” is a technical term from the field of acoustics that describes the perceived dislocation in the position of a sound source. The exhibition considers two opposing tendencies: dislocation—how objects, artworks, and cultural belongings are taken from their original context and silenced through the mechanisms of museological preservation and display—and location—how architecture and acoustics affect exhibitions as resonant spaces of situated listening. 

Shifting Center will utilize theatrical infrastructure and spatial audio technologies, such as Higher Order Ambisonics and Wave Field Synthesis, and propose techniques and practices to locate and listen to contemporary artworks that are themselves locating and listening to past events, instruments, architectures, and landscapes. The exhibition will include works from Tania Candiani, Padmini Chettur and Maarten Visser, Beatriz Cortez, Guillermo Escalón and Igor de Gandarias, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Maurice Louca, and Clarissa Tossin, among others. 

The potential of listening through ancient and Indigenous instruments and repertoires, and to landscapes and architectures as sources of sounding, unites the works. Escalón’s script follows composer Gandarias’ experiments translating infrasounds from the seismic activity of Guatemala’s Fuego volcano as an instrument of the earth. Candiani activates Hole-in-the-Rock, an Arizona geological formation that resembles a loudspeaker. Chettur and Visser position the axes of a dancing body in the mandala-like geometry of an amphitheater at the archaeological site of Nagarjunakonda, South India, displaced and relocated by the building of a hydro-electric dam. Tossin entwines the voice of K’iche’ poet Rosa Chávez with Alethia Lozano Birrueta playing 3D replicas of ancient Maya flutes held in museum collections. The microtonal composition of Louca’s ensemble searches for missing vowels through the imagination of animal vocalizations, magical texts and demotic songs, while the screeching frequencies of Luger’s Aztek “death whistles” sound the transition between the living and the dead.

Shifting Center will extend through a partnership with Storm King Art Center and the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics at The New School to support Cortez’s monumental sculpture Ilopango, The Volcano that Left (2023), which will sail up the Hudson River to EMPAC for the opening of the exhibition. The journey will be documented by Escalón for a film to be premiered in 2024. 

Nida Ghouse is a writer and curator teaching at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She received the 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation fellowship for Shifting Center at EMPAC, where she is curator-in-residence. She worked at Haus der Kulturen der Welt from 2016 through 2021, where she co-curated/co-edited Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017/2021), and curated A Slightly Curving Place (2020) in the framework of An Archaeology of Sound, a collaborative project responding to the acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi. The project traveled to Alserkal Arts Foundation (2021-22) and encompasses Coming to Know, a discursive program with Brooke Holmes; A Supplementary Country Called Cinema, a film program with Surabhi Sharma; and An Archaeology of Listening, a publication series with Archive Books. She was visiting lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University (2022) and co-artistic director of the Singapore Biennale 2022.

Vic Brooks, Nida Ghouse

EMPAC—Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• Troy, NY
• Shifting Center
• October 28 – November 19, 2023
• $75,000

Single project