Sound triggers a showcase of memories
Aga Khan Museum adds soundscapes to its galleries
The Aga Khan Museum has joined a growing number of institutions that are enhancing their exhibits with sound.
Three summers ago, the National Gallery in London, England, enticed visitors with a show called Soundscapes, encouraging them to “Hear the painting. See the sound.” The critics’ response was mixed, with the Telegraph calling the show “painfully unambitious.” The Evening Standard suggested paintings should “be seen and not heard.”
To dismiss the Aga Khan Museum’s Listening to Art, Seeing Music as unambitious would do a disservice to the difference between a building hung with paintings and the threeyear-old Toronto museum’s mission to showcase the enduring art, culture and faith of Muslim peoples around the world.
A traditional art museum is about objects. At the Aga Khan, beliefs and ideals are as important as any artifact on display.
“As an institution, we deal not just with tangible culture but also with intangible culture,” says Amir Ali Alibhai, curator of Listening to Art, Seeing Musicand the museum’s head of performing arts. For him, music is the ultimate intangible.
Alibhai’s interventions begin in the building’s public spaces. The entrance from the underground parking garage features the oud, the Arab ancestor to the European lute.
We also get to see three examples of oud craftsmanship in glass display cases.
The performer on the soundtrack is Radwan Al Taleb, a Syrian expat living in Canada. One oud on display was entrusted to him by a Syrian master craftsman who wanted to make sure the instrument would not be destroyed in his country’s bitter civil war.
Al Taleb recorded his music at the Aga Khan Museum, which regularly presents concerts in its auditorium. Alibhai points out that most of the exhibit soundscapes have come from these live concerts.
We see and hear flamenco artists, musicians from the Middle East, the Balkans, Iran, Northern India and other stops along the storied Silk Road. Each is given a site-specific context, illuminating some aspect of history or culture.
Listening to Art, Seeing Music also includes small video installations and an intriguing interactive digital music station in the auditorium’s lobby.
The real showstopper is the stunning Disruption as Rapture, a 2016 audiovisual reimagining by American-Pakistani artist Shahzia Sikander of a 17th-century Sufi story. That story itself retold an earlier Hindu tale. (The museum previously showed Disruption at Nuit Blanche last year.)
The show’s most visible addition is a Mongolian yurt, occupying the open central courtyard. The new circular structure was bought and shipped to Canada by the museum to serve as a meeting spot and intimate space in which local musicians from all cultures could jam together.
“Take a look at newcomers and see what they bring with them,” says Alibhai as we sit in the yurt. “Often it’s the intangible things that make a difference. You bring your songs, your stories, your recipes. These are the things that persist in migrations and can be shared.”
Above all, “music is an effective trigger of memories,” says the curator. And what is a museum if it can’t enhance the collection of these memories?
Listening to Art, Seeing Music opened on Jan. 20 and runs alongside the Aga Khan Museum’s permanent collection until April 22. Alibhai has planned a series of concerts, lectures and guided tours as part of the show. See agakhanmuseum.org for details. Classical music writer John Terauds is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.