In October 2021, I visited the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to see an exhibition of Yousuf Karsh’s photography. The museum was also presenting an exhibition about voice at the time, so I took that in as well.
It was an unusual exhibition. Even its title stood out: a question in itself—How Long Does It Take for One Voice to Reach Another?
The question has an urgent relevance. Our era is beset by divisions: communities have become so fractured that they no longer hear one another; the voices of marginalized groups are suppressed or ignored; and mainstream media maintain a firm hold over which voices reach the public…
Through the works on display, the exhibition invited us to reflect on voice—not only as an acoustic phenomenon, but also as a metaphor for human thought and feeling.
© Richard HuangThe exhibition’s title comes from a line by activist poet Carolyn Forché. Exploring the human voice in both physical and metaphorical terms, the exhibition used art to ask what it means to seek meaningful connection when we are forced into isolation. From Old Master paintings and ancient manuscripts to contemporary installations, the works prompted us to consider the countless ways in which we listen to one another. Once we have grown accustomed to staying behind closed doors, how do we reach out? Why do we so often turn a deaf ear to the voices most in need of being heard?
The exhibition’s title…has broader implications at this moment in history, when so many voices are ignored and those we do hear are often transmitted through a television, computer, or smartphone screen.
Organized thematically, the exhibition explored voice not only as a sonic phenomenon, but also as a symbolic expression of human emotion…
Across Time and Space
When distance separates us, how can we hear and be heard? Whether they come from the past or from far away, the voices embodied in these works allow communication between worlds and speak to our longing for connection with others.
Our perception of sounds in the natural world is immediate. Other voices reach us less directly: the mysterious voices of the supernatural, metaphorical voices, inherited histories, ancestral customs, oral traditions, and rituals. Art breathes new life into these voices across time and restores their visibility. It clearly plays a vital role in forging connections across both time and space.
© Richard HuangOn entering the gallery, the first thing that leapt into view was an enormous wooden megaphone titled Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (1991).
© Richard HuangRebecca Belmore created the work in response to the Oka Crisis. In 1990, protests were held across Canada in support of the Mohawk Nation of Kanesatake and its struggle for recognition of its land rights. During this period, Belmore took her megaphone across the country, visiting Indigenous communities in rural areas and cities and inviting chiefs, activists, and poets to speak through it in their own languages.
© Richard HuangThrough this object, the artist transformed a poetic gesture into a resonant act of political protest.
Sound Without Sound
How can visual art stimulate the other senses? Images are silent, yet artists can engage our hearing through their work, conveying sound or music through vision alone.
© Richard HuangMusic has long inspired celebrated painters. Yves Gaucher, a leading figure in Quebec abstraction, incorporated the atonal music of composer Anton Webern into his art. In Prelude and Fugue for Six Squares, the composition is structured by crisp horizontal lines punctuating a monochrome ground like notes on a musical score. Visual art, like music, can be both read and heard. In the paintings shown here, shifts in texture and color across the graphic surface re-create musical rhythm.。
© Richard HuangMusical intonation also emerges through repetition, whether in the form of marks on a surface or in the repeated forms of the objects themselves. Textual elements in these works interpret sonic phenomena such as echoes, as well as musical forms, styles, and ensembles…
© Richard HuangStéphane La Rue is an important figure in Quebec painting who creates remarkably varied work with minimal means. Working almost entirely in monochrome white, he takes painting back to zero. Deceptively simple, his works oscillate with a distinctive rhythm between object and image within carefully constructed visual fields, revealing La Rue as a master of complexity.
The Voice of the Body
© Richard HuangBesides containing and producing sound, the body also carries objects. It is a transmitter of sound: from anguished cries to whispers, the body bears and reveals the signals perceived by the ear.
© Richard HuangAs Betty Goodwin’s Carbon demonstrates, one body can also speak to another,
© Richard Huangor the human voice can address the skin, as in Ying Gao’s interactive garment. Confronted by the threat of clothing bristling with thorns, we are prompted to explore the body as a site of sensation.
© Richard Huang
© Richard HuangAt times, the body itself listens, as in Barbara Steinman’s diptych, where open palms turn outward like attentive ears.
© Richard Huang
© Richard Huang
© Richard HuangA recurring theme in this section is the vulnerability of the human figure, whether evoked through the pleading cry in Geneviève Cadieux’s photograph,
© Richard Huangor through the protection offered by Nick Cave’s Soundsuit. In these works, sound both bears witness to bodily suffering and becomes its sign.
Voices of Resistance
Language is often enlisted in the struggle against injustice, reverberating through many forms of art. Artists use visual vocabularies to make their voices heard and express the prejudices they and their peers confront. Their work seeks, in part, to denounce and overturn the status quo. Whether condemning censorship or confronting inequality, the artists shown here raise their voices against oppression and violence.
© Richard HuangResistance can begin by giving voice to those who have been neglected or silenced. In her installation on the central wooden platform, Shilpa Gupta presents the words of poets imprisoned for their political beliefs. Artists such as Hannah Claus and Nadia Myre evoke the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples by reappropriating the material language of broken treaties, as in the red fabric work on the right. Meanwhile, Irene Whittome’s installation on the left uses language and symbols to question structures of institutional subordination. The voices of resistance resound through these works and reverberate across the exhibition.
The Voice That Went Unheard
© Richard HuangStanley Février created this work following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Floyd, an African American man, was arrested by police and lay face down on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back while an officer pressed a knee into his neck. Floyd cried out, “I can’t breathe,” until he could no longer speak. Although his voice went unheard that day, his plea for help echoed around the world, forcing a global reckoning with systemic racism and institutionalized violence.
To make the work, Février cast his own body in plaster in the position in which Floyd died. The process required his entire body to be covered in plaster, deliberately inducing a degree of suffocation and embodying the violence inflicted on Floyd and on Black people more broadly. Although Février is of African descent, the sculpture is white. Its color evokes the marble of classical sculpture, suggesting a memorial to Floyd’s death. The sculpture is therefore at once a self-portrait, a portrait of a life tragically cut short, and an indictment of racism and brutality.
The sculpture was first shown publicly in Montréal-Nord. As part of the presentation, Février invited people to gather around it holding signs bearing the names of victims of police brutality in Canada. An artist who believes art can be a medium for social change, Février hoped the work would encourage greater attention to the many voices that are too often ignored or go unheard as they call for justice and social equality.
Silent Witness
© Richard HuangBreath—and, by extension, life and human presence—lies at the heart of the works in this section. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s installation reveals the inseparable bond between breath and the human voice. Through a mechanical cycle, it captures a person’s exhalation and mimics the action of the respiratory system, preserving a trace of human life indefinitely…
© Richard HuangThe light emitted by 772 bulbs in Yann Pocreau’s work Light/Time is also a metaphor for human life. In this poetic installation, the flickering bulbs and their varying intensities suggest the act of breathing. Salvaged from Saint-Luc Hospital, they bear silent witness to the lives of the patients who once occupied its 772 rooms.
Whether manifested through breath or through light, life is given form in these works.
The Forty Part Motet: Voices in Unison
© Richard HuangWhen Janet Cardiff first heard the forty-part motet Spem in alium nunquam habui, or “I Have Never Put My Hope in Any Other,” she longed to hear each melodic line in the score on its own. She asked the Salisbury Cathedral Choir to record separately the voices in this complex work, composed by Thomas Tallis in the sixteenth century for eight choirs of five parts each. Cardiff then carefully arranged forty speakers in a 360-degree circle, each carrying a single vocal line—a single voice. Visitors are invited to move among the individual strands of the polyphonic composition; from the center, every voice can be heard in perfect harmony.
The installation immerses us in music composed in the sixteenth century, and I found it deeply moving. The music is simply beautiful—a pleasure to hear. The exhibition’s organizers intended the work to offer visitors time for reflection and introspection, as well as a brief escape from reality.
The Forty Part Motet eloquently demonstrates the power of both the individual voice and voices joined as one—a harmony that requires something from each of us.
Your Voice
© Richard Huang
© Richard HuangIn the exhibition’s final section, visitors were invited to leave their own voices on three concentric bands of blank paper.
© Richard HuangI left the exhibition with much to take away and reflect upon. At a time of accelerating division and deep loneliness, exploring communication and expression clearly has real significance. Still, I sometimes wonder whether such works are too poetic and mournful. They raise important questions but offer no solutions. Then again, art is only art; it is not a blueprint for action.
© Richard HuangFor most of us, rather than dwelling on the question “How long does it take for one voice to reach another?”, perhaps we should ask ourselves something more direct: When you are dissatisfied, when you witness injustice, when you feel angry—did you speak up?
If we lack the courage to stand up and raise our voices, the question of whether we will be heard never even arises—let alone how long it might take.