Expanded Aurality: Doing Sonic Feminism in the White Cube

This thesis is a practice-led quest to expand aurality in white cube gallery spaces. Using video art installation practice, feminist phenomenology and spatial theory, it explores the soundscape of whitened contemporary exhibition spaces and questions how women-produced sounding video artworks, the experiencing bodies and background noise affect the production of the gallery in perceptual and socio-political terms. This project proposes that the archetypal white cube, as a product of modernism, has served as an architectural and institutional construct since the start ofthe twentieth century. Built on ocularcentric, patriarchal and capitalist ideology, it has continued to condition our way of displaying and experiencing art. The white cube has primarily accommodated rational, individualised and decontextualised white heteronormative middle-class male subjects, whilst quieting and excluding stereotypically ‘irrational’, ‘subjective’ and ‘feminised’ bodies and their sound from the gallery walls. The white cube, in this sense, has operated as a site of policed silencing and gendered control. This thesis makes an intervention into the field of contemporary art and museum studies by proposing the need to readdress the legacy of the whitecube’s gendered and autonomous ideology by bringing video art, sound and genderstudies into the white cube debate through theory and practice. This project introduces a methodology of sonic feminism: the acts of speaking the mother tongue and listening to all-sound when exhibiting and experiencing video art inside the gallery walls. Whilst reflecting on my video art projects, I propose that once we allow our bodies to engage in the totality of sound and speak in a language that aims to offer rather than claimwhen being with art, we might begin to dismantle the white cube’s gendered and spatio-temporal limitations. We might then discover a more expanded white cube – anaesthetic site that exceeds gender binaries, empowers social connectedness andoffers a whole-bodied engagement with art, a white cube that is home for all-bodies rather than some.