Listening to Voices

Installation Opening:
Thu | Feb 29 | 5pm

Installation Timings:
Fri | Mar 1 | 10am – 8pm
Sat | Mar 2 | 10am – 8pm
Sun | Mar 3 | 10am – 8pm
Mon | Mar 4 | 10am – 8pm
Tue | Mar 5 | 10am – 8pm

Speaking authentically and listening attentively can be radical acts. What might it mean to practice this attunement in our busy noise-filled urban lives?

Inspired by Itaru Sasaki’s ‘Wind Phone’, Listening to Voices consists of two phone booths. In the speaking booth, you are invited to make a call, perhaps a difficult one, to anyone on an old rotary phone with a line to nowhere. Maybe the call is to someone no longer reachable or around something that you don’t know to say. All the while, you will have the sounds of Bangalore’s remaining green spaces to give you company.

In our listening booth, you can pick from our collection of audio stories about mental health in the city. How did some of the independence era psychiatrists think about ‘Indianzing Psychiatry’? How does mental illness show up in Kannada cinema and literature? What do people feel about the green spaces around Bangalore? And how have some people transformed the top-down model of mental health?

What stories might we be missing? And what other sounds from Bangalore could we add? Any comments and feedback for this prototype installation would be much appreciated.

Location: The installation is free and open to all in the BIC Garden area. Please follow the signs.

Presented by Anmol Tikoo, Namma 560 Grantee. This Foundation Project is implemented by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) under the  Project 560 programme, made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.