Project overview
‘Voices in the Gallery’ is a research project about how voice, text and access intersect in contemporary art. Led by Sarah Hayden, this open-ended, multi-form project involves collaborations with numerous artists, artsworkers, activists and arts organisations in the UK, US and Ireland. Having manifested via myriad subprojects, Voices in the Gallery has also led to many subsequent collaborations. Details of some of these follow below.
Sarah’s research is inflecting how art is produced by artists, exhibited by institutions and mediated for the public. It advances the development, and awareness of creative approaches to access in artmaking. This research has already led to sustained changes to how art institutions practice accessibility in their programming. Through collaboration with artists and arts professionals to explore the creative potential of access as ethos, Sarah shapes artistic practice. Her work is contributing to the creation of new artworks that use access as medium, making existing artworks accessible to new publics, and increasing public and professional expectations of access in the arts.
Voices in the Gallery was originally funded by two AHRC Innovation Fellowships ( AH/S004262/1 2019-2021, AH/V006096/1 2021-2023). Project activities and offshoots have since gained additional support from sources including Artfund Reimagine, Mondriaan Fund, SIAH HEIF Research Stimulus Fund, and the British Art Network.
slow emergency siren, ongoing
Across 2021-2022, Sarah worked closely with LUX on slow emergency siren, ongoing: a project to make Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs more, and differently, accessible. Together, they commissioned Elaine Lillian Joseph to write and perform augmented audio description for the film and invited the Care-fuffle Working Group to develop creative captions. Audio-description and caption-users advised on the translations of sounds and images as they evolved. The newly captioned and audio-described Handsworth Songs was first screened at LUX on 2nd October 2022, then at MAC Birmingham on 11th June 2023. In June 2024, it was screened at the BFI as part of the Tigritudes Pan-African Film Cycle. This new version of Handsworth Songs is now available from LUX for screenings and exhibitions.
Integral to slow emergency siren, ongoing, is a commitment to documenting the processes involved. This documentation and dissemination of what we learned, and how took many forms. Throughout the project, Sarah worked with Daly & Lyon, An Endless Supply and the UK Association for Accessible Formats to design a large-print book and website. This dual-format publication makes the captions and annotated audio description available to read or hear, and also contains new essays on Handsworth Songs (by Clive Nwonka) and audio description (by me). In spring 2024, they made available the Notes on the Design: an accessibly designed digital guide, explaining how and why both formats of the slow emergency siren, ongoing publication look, sound and feel the way they do.
The captioning and audio-description processes were also recorded and reflected upon. Social practice sound artist, Hannah Kemp-Welch was commissioned to make Voices Surface: An Audio-Documentary about Accessing Handsworth Songs. Captioned by Care-fuffle, and featuring the voices of Elaine Lillian Joseph, Sarah Hayden, Dr Clive Nwonka, Sonia Hinds, Trevor Mathison, Anita Wolska-Kaslow, Mickel Smithen and Benjamin Cook, this audio-documentary can now be heard, watched or read via the LUX website: https://lux.org.uk/voices-surface-an-audio-documentary-about-accessing-handsworth-songs/
The Art of Captioning
In 2022, Sarah co-led a new Art of Captioning British Art Network research group with Hannah Wallis, an artist, curator and d/Deaf activist. Online public events they organized for this group included a panel discussion with access workers and BSL interpreters, Making Access Work, and a workshop with Care-fuffle Working Group and Nina Thomas on Caption-writing and Caption Consultation. A (live-streamed) public event, Temporalities of Access, took place in conjunction with Wysing Arts Centre on November 5th 2022. All events were live-captioned and BSL interpreted. Membership of the Art of Captioning research group encompassed artists, researchers, curators, arts workers, activists and access workers, all of whom came together to consider questions of access awareness, access accountability and access planning across contexts including commissions, exhibitions, performance, collections and live events. Sarah and Hannah were also invited to present on access as ethos at events for arts and film professionals including EU Screen: Translating Media Pasts Symposium (Prague, December 2022), Animating Archives, 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning (Brixton, June 2022) and British Art Network Research Group Leads Workshop (March 2022).
Liza Sylvestre | asweetsea
In 2022, Sarah curated Liza Sylvestre’s asweetsea at John Hansard Gallery (8th October 2022 - 14th January 2023). This was Sylvestre’s first solo exhibition outside of the United States and featured newly commissioned video, sculptures, drawings and (captioned) audio tours. As an artist who is deaf, and whose child and partner are both hearing, Sylvestre tries to locate where her disability lives within their family. She conceives of her work as a site to share experience and to form new ways of understanding the intersection of senses, access, and learned systems of communication. In asweetsea, Sylvestre’s playful, probing works investigated how we make, share and access meaning together.
A new iteration of asweetsea was at Collective in Edinburgh from 21st October to 23rd December 2023 and work created for the show continues to be shown. Video (captioned, with BSL interpretation) of a conversation between Sarah, Liza and Lauren La Rose is available on the Collective website. In the first phase of Voices in the Gallery, Sarah had invited Sylvestre to contribute to the group exhibition, Many voices, all of them loved, which she curated at John Hansard Gallery in 2020. Later, she wrote about Sylvestre’s work in a 2023 open access article, “A Cognitive Listening”: attending to captioning via the critical “unvoiceover”. Hayden and Sylvestre continue to collaborate, including on the Blue Description Project (below).
Caption-Conscious Ecology
In 2021, Sarah worked with Nottingham Contemporary and Hannah Wallis to devise the Caption-Conscious Ecology workshop and talk series, with interventions from disability activists, artists, academics and access workers. Contributors included Louise Hickman, Tanya Titchkosky, Jaipreet Virdi and Collective Text. All events were live-captioned and BSL-interpreted.
With support from an ArtFund Reimagine Grant, Wallis and Hayden subsequently worked together to develop a two-part Caption-Conscious Ecology commissioning project. This culminated in Portland Forecast: a new film by the artist, Seo Hye Lee, and a free digital provocation-as-resource, Thinking of Captioning an Artist Film? by Collective Text.
A Language of Holes
In 2022, Sarah worked again with Hannah Wallis, as well as with Wysing Arts Centre, on A Language of Holes: a project exploring innovative approaches to captioning in live contexts. They collaborated with Club Urania to present a performance commission from Nat Raha and invited frequent collaborator, Hannah Kemp-Welch to deliver a series of accessible o-o radio workshops to young people at Wysing.
Further collaborations
While the AHRC funding period for Voices in the Gallery ended in January 2023, Sarah continues to explore--through research and creative practice--the relations between voice, text and access and art. Recent related collaborations with artists include:
Blue Description Project
In 2023-24, Sarah collaborated with Liza Sylvestre and Christopher Robert Jones of Crip* on the Blue Description Project (BDP). Invested in a cripistemological (a portmanteau of ‘crip’ and ‘epistemological’) creative-critical framework where Disabled/Crip epistemologies function methodologically rather than as mere subject matter, the Blue Description Project engages Derek Jarman's Blue (1993) via expanded and critical accessibility. Reflecting Blue’s standing as a foundational work of Crip* art, the project challenges ableist hierarchies in art while focusing on the generative possibilities of difference and interdependence. On the 30th anniversary of its release and Jarman’s death, the Blue Description Project creates a new, experimental iteration of Blue.
The Blue Description Project premiered on February 15th 2024 at SAIC, Chicago. Since then, it has been presented at BFI, London, MIT List Visual Arts Centre, Boston, Personal Space Gallery, California, Irish Film Institute, Dublin, Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, MoCA San Diego and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. It will be screened at the MAC, Birmingham in November 2025. Screenings of the Blue Description Project have been presented with live ASL, BSL and ISL interpretation. It has recently been translated into Spanish and Korean and is now being translated into Dutch.
as if […] wearing anklesocks
In 2023, the artist Sarah Browne invited Sarah Hayden to write a text in response to Buttercup, a moving image artwork and solo exhibition, first presented at SIRIUS, Cobh, County Cork, 13 April – 29 June 2024. Hayden’s long-form poem, as if […] wearing anklesocks, is an experiment in translating Browne’s film into words. Like Browne’s film, Hayden’s text was made to be accessible in multiple ways. Originally performed on the site of the exhibition, as if […] wearing anklesocks was released as an artists’ edition publication designed by Rose Nordin and produced by Kunstverein Aughrim. A word document accessible for use by screen readers was made available for download and captioned video and audio performances of the poem by Hayden were made available via the Kunstverein Aughrim website.
