Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen

In Summer 2025, Nottingham Contemporary will present Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen, a thematic group exhibition and associated live programme which considers how sound travels and transitions through cross-cultural identities, histories, and futures. Drawing on writer and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s methods of “foraging” and “disfiguration” the exhibition will feature sound as the leading medium to consider how artists have listened to and reimagined complex histories.

This ambitious group exhibition and accompanying live programme presents artworks that “listen back” to uncover silenced or lost histories while also creating new moments to receive and hold historical dissonance. Across all four galleries at Nottingham Contemporary, Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen aims to consider the past as a historical ground to incite emancipatory expressions and practices of reconstitution and solidarity, while inviting audiences to experience and reflect on the many positions from which we listen.

Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen presents international, multi-generational practices, including new commissions by Satch Hoyt, Raheel Khan and Dylan Robinson, alongside works by Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Hong-Kai Wang, Simnikiwe Buhlungu, amongst others. The artworks span a range of media including moving image, multi-channel immersive sound installations, reworked historical analogue sound, sculpture, textiles, painting, and performance.