Bhavisha Panchia & John Peffer

In this special contribution, curator Bhavisha Panchia and art historian John Peffer introduce the vinyl publication Notes on Cuts, which has been expanded into a Listening Room for the exhibition Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen at Nottingham Contemporary. Notes on Cuts explores the look, the sound, and the feel of physical damage done to records by censors at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) during apartheid, where songs were physically scratched to prevent them from being played on air. Peffer plays back these cuts anyway, analyzes their textural and visual aspects, and listens closely for the new sounds created by the indeterminacy of the censors' scratching hands. The Notes on Cuts vinyl LP is an intentional creative intervention into this archive of damage. The 44-page book which accompanies the vinyl LP offers a critical understanding into the history of South African radio and its bureaucracy of censorship, and includes detailed notes that describe the songs, itemise the scratches, and ponder the new beats and tunes created.  The vinyl LP Notes on Cuts was made in collaboration with curator Bhavisha Panchia and designer Gabrielle Guy. It is published on Nothing to Commit Records. Bhavisha Panchia is a curator and writer of contemporary art. Her curatorial and written work centres on the social, cultural and ideological signification of sound and music in contemporary culture. With an interest in auditory media’s relationship to geopolitical paradigms, anti/postcolonial discourses and imperial histories, she considers how we can critically listen back to listen forward. She is the founder of Nothing To Commit Records, a label and publishing platform committed to the production and expansion of knowledge related to contemporary art and sound within and across the global South. It serves to expand on existing cultural artifacts, to not only recuperate neglected histories and cultural heritage, but also as a means to producing an archive for future consideration and exploration. John Peffer is Professor of Art History at Ramapo College in New Jersey. His work foregrounds creative interventions that engage troubled histories. His writing has examined the historiography of African Art History, art and visual culture in South Africa during apartheid, and wider issues of global modernity and human rights in art, photography, visuality, and sound.