"1. The original idea for this exhibition arose out of a need to map the endeavour in the visual arts to address the need that some artists experience to abandon the visual component of their work, which is probably the heart of their work, in order to fill an emotional space, define a physical area or conceptualise the physical nature of the relationship between their work and the viewer by the means of what can be evokes by a sound (a voice, for example). We are not concerned here with the correspondence between image and sound or vice versa. This is not, as will be seen, an exhibition of "Sound Art". In contemporary art, as well as in audio-visual culture, the ear is almost as inextricably linked to the eye as taste is to the sense of smell - if this analogy can be allowed.

The aim of this exhibition is to bring together a group of works that - using an old Socratic metaphor - turn the eye inwards through the suggestion of a vibration.

2. Sound penetrates our bodies in a way that we cannot prevent or escape (the ear is a hole in the head, strangely close to the brain), Sound, that is broadcast sound, has penetrated every area of our culture. Since the 1920s, recorded sound (first on rolls, then in ceramic form, moving to records, tapes and, finally, to digital sound) has multiplied the possibility of hearing sounds after they are first produced, enabling them to be edited, assembled, spliced together and broadcast.

In this way, sound, has permeated all other forms of art and representation, as well as all the possible means of presenting, distributing and viewing images, above all moving images, together with other artistic forms and methodologies (those that are commonly called "generic" art forms).

In this sense, the question of using sound in the context of contemporary art is inseparable from two other important issues: the possibility of reproduction (and associated questions relating to duplicates, copies and the original, etc.) as well as the question of genre migration (art as a "general" entity free from the cultural constraints of different artistic procedures).

3. The introduction of sound was firstly the latest signal of the move from the field of the visual to another, wider field, and, simultaneously (additionally, it seems), to a field that had no aesthetic rules by which it could be judged. At the beginning of the 20th century, as at the beginning of the 1960s, rejection of the idea of genre led to a rejection of the idea of the canon, which results, in turn, from a need to destroy or undermine the foundations underlying judgements of taste (in this sense, avant-garde artists are viscerally opposed to the possibility of aesthetics, because, on one hand, they are sceptical of the possibility of a model of humanity, and, on the other, because they do not believe in the possibility of upholding the canon as a basis for formulating judgements).

There remains, however, the affirmation of the voice as the first sign of the expressive possibilities of the body, either in a version born out of poetry (in its Greek form as words both spoken and heard) or in a modern form based on a Hertzian idea of the voice as an occupation of space, something that is simultaneously broadcast and intimate.

Thus, when the visual arts make use of the voice, as in Schwitters's Ursonate or in the intimacy of Vito Acconci, the voice is being used to instigate or to establish a body, which justifies the existence of the voice. It is also of importance that this voice is heard in its natural register, that is, its performative nature is not theatrical. On the contrary, the majority of works using sound created by visual artists do not relate to theatrical methods - that is, to any direct ambition to create scenic space for performance in contrast with a creative space in a common and shared temporality, but, on the contrary, the recorded and reproduced voice shares the same space with the viewer.

4. In the case of the works included in The Invisible Show, the exhibited works share this condition (that's why we keep on referring to them as "exhibited" works, not as "heard" works).

The Invisible Show begins by exploring historical references represented by the works of Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann and Luigi Russolo and then follows post-war developments that led up to the use of sound by contemporary artists such as Luísa Cunha, Antoni Muntadas, Julião Sarmento, Stephen Vitiello, Ceal Floyer, Rodney Graham and Janet Cardiff. Other features of the exhibition include the narrative pieces by Acconci and Joan Jonas, the trace of memory in Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman' s imperativeness, James Lee Byars' enchantment, Martin Creed's irony and Joseph Beuys' performativity, alongside works by Juan Hidalgo, On Kawara and Michael Snow, forerunners in the field.

5. In programmatic terms, the exhibition is based on three key areas of reference in contemporary art: space, narrative and the transversal possibilities of the audio and visual fields.

In simple terms, we could say that the visual arts in the 20th century set the task of finding a way to return constantly to the idea of disturbance, displacement, movement or flight as seen in the works of many artists present in the exhibition who, by using the voice, they take us to other places or situations.

Sound, which in this exhibition is almost exclusively the sound of the human voice, creates spaces and refashions them, that is, it turns them into other places, into utopias. This spatial alteration created by sound also gives rise to an aesthetic category that is particularly relevant to the art of the previous century, which we can describe as ‘architectonic strangeness'.

The space represented to us through the experience of sound is, in fact, particularly complex and, in the way that it is disturbing, is closely related to the idea of the inhospitable. We even speak of a negative space in the sense that its existence is totally conditional on an element, which - not being visual - fills the space it occupies up to the moment that the viewer realises that his body is being moulded by sound, both physically and emotionally.

It is a process of affection, the occupation of a space that is sometimes black, sometimes touching and poetic."

Delfim Sardo
Curator of the exhibition