“I Hear with My Whole Body” – On the Borders of the Presence and Non-Presence of Sonorous Bodies

Abstract

The contemporary Hungarian artist, Hajnal Németh is concerned with the visual, corporeal, and aural chasm opened up by the frequently invisible, dislocated or muted object proper of her works. Music, sounds, noises pour into the exhibition spaces constituting, what Don Ihde terms, the shape- aspect of things and bodies. The abyss automatically calls for surrogate narratives, identities, and artefacts to defy our existential insecurity. Németh creates the conditions for this pluralism through a Merleau-Pontian synergy of the tangible and the visible, as well as by exploiting the conventionally unnoticed sonorous quality of shapes, surfaces, and interiors, evoking Ihde’s aural phenomenology. Németh offers the promise of a recreated subjectivity at the concurrence of the aural, the visible and the tangible.