Suffocating Sound: Institutional Breath and Sonic Control in Ima-Abasi Okon’s 2019 Chisenhale show

Miguel’s Adorn was once the soundtrack to my dance lessons, but in this installation I couldn’t recognise it. The six channel sound work alongside-ness with-out identification1 + excess over the original value1< (A-------d--------o---------r--------n), (2019)[1] had been doctored to create this rich and thick sound; a kind of sexy sound that runs at odds with the space itself.

The work’s sonic manipulation is striking not just in its estrangement from its original form, but also in how it interacts with the gallery space itself. The piece does not simply play in the room, it inhabits it, diffusing through the air and the walls, reshaping the environment into something unsettling.

It appears that the sound is being generated by the air-conditioning units:

(Unbounded [sic]-Vibrational [sic] Always [sic]-on-the-Move [sic]) Praising Flesh (An _Extra aSubjective p,n,e,u,m,a-mode of Being T,o,g,e,t,h,e,r), (2019)[2],

which can give the impression that the units are faulty or malfunctioning.

The sound stttttttttuters slightly, creating an almost claustrophobic atmosphere within the space. These machines, typically associated with circulation, air and breath, seem to be slowing down and spluttering, as though they as gasping for air. This sound work introduces themes of pain, labour, extraction, and breath more explicitly than the other works in the show.

This entanglement of the sonic and spatial components of this work can invite a reading of the museum as a carceral space. Looking at the writing of Nicholas Gamso,[3] brings in the exploration of the museum as a site of mirroring for institutional structures of display. The modern museum [or gallery] exerts some kind of disciplinary force which regulates how bodies move, gather, and even breath within its confines. With this in mind, the manipulated sound of Adorn does not just produce an aesthetic experience, it actively disrupts the regulated, sanitised air of the museum, forcing attention to its structural violence.

Sound, as an ephemeral and spatially uncontainable medium, becomes a tool for highlighting these often invisible forms of institutional constraint. The museum, much like the carceral institution, operates through the management of space and movement; the lowered ceiling tiles, in conjunction with the suffocating quality of the sound, create a material experience of enclosure. The stuttering breath of the machines does not simply allude to the environmental determinants of premature death in densely connected political geographies[4]  – it enacts them, turning the museum into an uncanny simulation of a constrained, oxygen deprived environment.

It this context, we can consider the work as a gesture towards the broader political geographies of confinement and extraction, resonating with Gamso’s analysis of the relationship between art institutions and systems of control. If the museum, as a site of cultural legitimacy, is also a site of managed exclusion [where some bodies, voices, and narratives are suppressed], then this piece intervenes in that space by unsettling its supposed neutrality. The manipulated sound does not just fill the room; it suffocates, unsettles, and transforms the experience of being within it, compiling the ways we understand the spatial politics of art institutions themselves.

[1] Ima-Abasi Okon, 'Ima-Abasi Okon at Chisenhale', [London: Chisenhale Gallery, 2019], https://chisenhale.org.uk/2024/05/22/Ima_Abasi_Okon_Exhibition_Handout.pdf, [accessed 14 February 2025] p6.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Nicholas Gamso, ‘Art After Liberalism’ [New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022]

[4] Gamso, ‘Art After Liberalism’, p134.