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"Without acoustics, archaeology is deaf. Without archaeology, acoustics is blind. - David Lubman"

The life and work of Umashankar Manthravadi is a history of sound and technology through the second half of the 20th century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces. This exhibition responds to his practice and proposes possibilities for listening to the past and its absence which remains. Centred around an audio play and a video installation, A Slightly Curving Place brings together writers, choreographers, composers, actors, dancers, musicians, field recordists, and sound, light, and graphic designers who engage and transform each other's work. Elements from Umashankar's biography serve as a compass amid the material in vitrines, as a dancing body positions the endlessness of time in relation to a series of ruptures that is history. Under a dome of speakers an assembly of listeners gathers to sense a past they cannot hear. The sound that arrives is only a record of sound as it might have been.

"What does it mean to listen to the past? An exhibition curated by Nida Ghouse"

"Coming to Know asks how listening to the past together might transform our sense of the knowledge held in common. It sets aside the visual techniques of the archaeological site, the museum, and the larger project of colonial modernity, and instead constitutes itself as a resonant structure-a future-oriented monument to historically situated listening bodies as well as a dwelling place for community now."

OPEN ACCESS FORTHCOMING AUTHORS ABOUT CONTACT A Slightly Curving Place asks what it means to listen to the past and its absence which remains. It responds to the practice of acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi, whose life and work are a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces. Comprising a range of perspectives in which his propositions reverberate, the publication attends to what he does, and to the political and performative potential of the past that he opens up.