The short version
- “Joyful Noise” has run at Salisbury Cathedral since May 16 and closes on October 25, 2026.
- Emeka Ogboh’s “Abide with me” projects the Cathedral Choir’s recorded voices from the Singing Gallery, a stone balcony built for exactly that purpose centuries ago.
- Christine Sun Kim’s work treats sound as something drawn, scored and argued over, which is how a Deaf artist makes a sound exhibition.
Above the west doors of Salisbury Cathedral is a medieval stone balcony called the Singing Gallery. The name tells you the job: voices sent out over the crowd below, from a height, with the whole west front behind them as a reflector. This summer it has been doing that job again.
“Joyful Noise,” curated by Mollie Barnes, opened on May 16 and closes on October 25. Two weeks remain. The exhibition gathers eight artists: Denzil Forrester, Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, Yuri Suzuki, Sokari Douglas Camp, Phyllida Barlow, Caroline Walker, Tim Etchells and Emeka Ogboh. Several work in paint, steel or text. Three of the pieces are about sound itself, and two of them are made of it.
The choir in the gallery
Emeka Ogboh’s Abide with me (2026) is an outdoor choral work. The voices are the Cathedral Choir’s, recorded, and they are projected from the Singing Gallery down over the Close. The hymn’s title is the piece’s whole instruction. Stand on the grass and the sound arrives from above and slightly ahead, the way it would have centuries ago, because the gallery was built to throw voices outward and the facade behind it does the rest. Nothing about this needs amplification to make sense; the stone is the loudspeaker.
Yuri Suzuki’s UTOOTO (2025) is a sound sculpture of pipes and horns through which multilingual voices emerge. Horns are the oldest acoustic amplifiers there are: a narrow throat opening to a wide mouth couples a small sound source to the air far more efficiently than the source alone. Suzuki uses that to make many languages share one object.
Sound you look at
Christine Sun Kim is a Deaf artist, and her work with Thomas Mader asks what sound is for someone who meets it through vibration, notation and other people’s behavior. She has long treated sound as a visual and political medium: drawn, charted, scored, assigned and withheld. In a building that was engineered to carry voices to people who could hear them, that question lands with unusual weight. Who gets to make the noise, and who is expected to receive it?
Why it moves people
The cathedral is not a neutral gallery. Its proportions were set to make human voices feel larger than human, and “Joyful Noise” puts contemporary work inside that machine instead of in a white box. Ogboh’s piece is the test case: a recorded choir, a medieval balcony, and the plain discovery that the architecture still works.
How to go
Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire, through Saturday, October 25, 2026. Ogboh’s piece is outdoors and free to hear from the Close. Check the cathedral’s page for opening hours and any service-time restrictions, which take precedence over the exhibition.
