After 5 years of workshops, talks and exhibition Infinite Ear is invited to Moscow, for an exhibition at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. As part of this programme, a discussion between curators and artists was held, and announced by the following text. 

Summing up an experimental project, exhibition curators and participants will discuss the outcomes of the exhibition Infinite Ear and the project A (Mis)reader’s Guide to Listening.

During the final conversation accompanying the show, the participants will discuss the following issues: how much has the exhibition Infinite Ear changed Garage Museum of Contemporary Art? Did it bring any new meanings to the Moscow environment? And did it become a landmark event for the deaf community?

For this exhibition, experimental performative mediation, carried out by the artists Lendl Barcelos, Valentina Desideri, and Myriam Levkowitz as part of the project A (Mis)reader’s Guide to Listening, has played a very special role. Delivered daily at Garage by mediators-performers who had completed training under the artists’ guidance, the mediation focused on experiencing deafness, by engaging deaf and hard of hearing experts in performative practices.

The visitors’ reactions to the experimental mediation implying miscellaneous and often unpredictable interaction with the viewer, varied a lot, with their feedback reports ranging from “sound massage with the mediator was a novel experience, full of relaxation, as if I had slept for seven hours, and also allowed me to discover new skills for comprehending and sensing the world”—to “the exhibitions remain unclear, as we were told that engaging in games with the artefacts was only possible together with special people, who ignored us. Bored.”

During the discussion, curators and artists whose works formed the core of the show and instigated the emergence of performative mediation as a new genre, will be also looking for answers to questions, such as: did the exhibition manage to turn into a platform for practicing the perception of sound? and what are the ultimate results of the mediators’ interaction with the visitors?