IMAGE: Tarek Atoui: The Whisperers Lab (featuring Chris Cogburn), The Contemporary Austin – Jones Center on Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas, 2022. Artwork © Tarek Atoui. Photograph by Leon Alesi.

The Whisperers Guided Listening Session

Please book your tickets in advance. A limited number of walkup tickets will be available at the door.

Sit back and breathe as you are treated to ambient and experimental sounds during a guided listening session presented in conjunction with our current exhibition, Tarek Atoui: The Whisperers. You’ll be led through this one-of-a-kind experience by musician-in-residence Chris Cogburn plus special guest collaborator Marine Peterson. You are sure to leave the session thinking and feeling about sound in new ways.

Artist and composer Tarek Atoui is the winner of the 2022 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize. His experimentation with sound as an expanded sensory experience is acclaimed worldwide.

Due to the nature of the program, capacity is limited. Reserve your spot in advance!

Chris Cogburn (b. 1973 Eugene, Oregon) is a percussionist living in Austin, Texas and Mexico City. Cogburn’s artistic practice is rooted in the collaborative context of improvisation. Current music practices focus on the threshold between acoustic and electronic sounds, their differing timbral qualities and their sites of resonance. Tensions between just intonation and the unfettered resonances of objects is a burgeoning concern informing his most recent work.

Marina Peterson is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work attends to elemental forces and shifting modalities of matter, exploring diverse and innovative ways of encountering and presenting the ethnographic. Her most recent book, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles traces environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through noise pollution legislation and the politics of airport noise in the 1960s, addressing key ways in which noise amplifies ways of sensing and making sense of the atmospheric. She has co-edited books on anthropology and art and is co-director of the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography at UT. A cellist, her improvisational practice experiments with sonic textures and materialities.