Coming to Know

Edited by Nida Ghouse in association with Jenifer Evans
Haus der Kulturen der Welt / archive books
Ca. 180 pages, English
ISBN: 978-3-948212-41-4
Price: €20

Coming soon, pre-orders via books@hkw.de and at b_books2, Haus der Kulturen der Welt

The life and work of Umashankar Manthravadi is a history of sound and technology through the second half of the 20th century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces. The publication An Archaeology of Listening accompanies the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place, and together they respond to the proposition in Umashankar’s practice that we can’t just look for theaters in landscapes of the past – we must listen for them. Including scripts, scores, conversations, and essays, the publication considers its own format in relation to the notion of writing as the first sound-recording device.

With contributions by Vinit Agarwal, Moushumi Bhowmik, Padmini Chettur, Nida Ghouse, Alexander Keefe, Sukanta Majumdar, Umashankar Manthravadi, Maarten Visser and others.

Jul 23–Sep 20, 2020

A Slightly Curving Place

Isipabbarabhumi is a Prakrit phrase from Jain cosmology referring to a special place above the heavens shaped like a parasol. It is where the disembodied souls of the perfected ones go to live in eternal isolation. There, sealed off from the rest of the cosmos, they are unable to interact with other souls, unable to hear them or be heard.