Voiceworks

An acute theorization of the human voice in contemporary art

Voiceworks is a perceptive exploration of contemporary artworks in which the primary medium of activation is the human voice. Engaging in close readings of video and installations primarily from the 2010s and 2020s, Sarah Hayden reveals how voiceworks intervene politically through their handling of writing and voicing.

Surveying works from eighteen established and emerging artists including Hito Steyerl, John Akomfrah, Alban Muja, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, and Cally Spooner, Voiceworks attends to the sensuous potentiality of voiced language in composition and physical space. The book elucidates how these works operate relationally, conscripting embodied involvement in the service of collective critical and resistant aims.

Augmented by Hayden’s experience as a curator of exhibitions and public programs around audiovisual work, Voiceworks skillfully traverses scholarship in critical theory, sound studies, film and video theory, poetics, and feminist criticism to analyze this prominent but underexplored strand of contemporary art practice.

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