By Ear

Lorna Bauer Peter Brock Mira Dayal Emma Safir

By Ear is taken from an idiom that underlines a condition of making and being without a score. In order to play by ear, the skilled musician has to rely entirely on sound, the medium’s purest and most uncompromising form, foregoing any system of its representation or transcription.

A shared condition of making, By Ear spatializes this poetic attunement exercised by the four artists through intervals—between elements of desire, matters of friction, aesthetics of conquest, and cadences in time. In hums, whispers, excursions and suspension, the artists materialize their imaginaries against reification, rehearsing opacities and freedoms that loosen conventions of perception, language and memory.