This podcast is taken from Opening The Channels, a Study day at Wysing which launched the Wysing Polyphonic residency programme and responded to Wysing's All Channels Open exhibition. The starting point of the day was to consider what steps could be taken to "open the channels" and what exactly is at stake in seeking to include "many voices". For the study day, spring residency artists Pallavi Paul, Claire Potter and Raju Rage were joined by invited contributors Taylor Le Melle, Annie Jael Kwan and Wail Qasim, all of whom were asked to think of a "resolution", a proposal for how institutions, artists and the public might ready themselves to confront 2017 with "all channels open".
With this event, we wanted to interrogate some of the ideas that are circulating around Wysing's programme at the moment: of "opening the channels", of giving platforms to "many voices", of encouraging polyphony even when the results are not sweet and harmonious but dischordant and unsettling. What does it mean and what does it take to encourage dissonant voices: voices that call us out, voices that warn us of things we don't want to believe?