Listen Gallery
Artist-run, non-profit, sound arts gallery and communal listening space, Glasgow, Scotland, U.K. We create spaces for listening through workshops, performances, exhibitions, screenings, and other sound-focused projects. Our aim is to make sound art accessible to everyone and to use listening as a way to create, collaborate, reflect, and grow together.
Events are free to access, and we provide food and tea as part of how we gather. Listening, for us, is an act of care: a way to understand ourselves, each other, and our environment. Through this space, we work to imagine better futures.
As an unfunded organisation, we strive for greater equity in the arts and are working to build stronger, more connected, and inclusive communities.
Re-Flecting
What immediately struck me was the way Rhia spoke about care not as an additional framework applied onto artistic practice, but as something foundational to how they understand communication itself. Reflecting on their background before entering gallery work, they explained:
“My background’s in social care. So I’ve been in social care before I was anything.”
This statement reframed the rest of the conversation for me. Care was not presented as a professional specialism separate from curatorial practice, but as the condition through which the practice became possible. Rhia described working with nonverbal service users and learning to communicate through multiple sensory forms: sound, smell, reaction, atmosphere, and gesture. Communication here exceeded language. It became relational, embodied, and intuitive.
They reflected:
“You didn’t have to necessarily share [language], but you could communicate through it quite deeply.”
I found myself thinking about how often galleries privilege verbal or textual forms of engagement while overlooking the sensory and emotional ways people move through space. Rhia instead described access as something learned through attentiveness to bodies, moods, and environments. Their experience in social care informed not only how they worked with artists, but how they imagined what a gallery could feel like.
What emerged throughout our conversation was an understanding of listening as an active political methodology. Rhia connected this directly to improvisation and sound practice, explaining:
“The whole idea of being an improv sound maker is that you’re listening and you’re tuning, and then you’re introducing the sound.”
I kept returning to this description afterwards. Improvisation here was not spontaneity for its own sake, nor self-expression detached from context. Instead, it described a form of responsiveness. Listening becomes an ethical position: paying attention to social and political conditions before acting within them. Rhia continued:
“It’s complete listening of what is needed, socially, politically, and then kind of improvising with it that adds to that need rather than trying to just add the shit that I think as an individual is really cool and interesting.”
I was struck by the rejection of artistic ego embedded within this statement. The role of the curator or programmer is not to impose meaning onto a space, but to tune into existing needs and work alongside them. The language of improvisation also suggested vulnerability. To improvise requires openness to uncertainty, to failure, to adjustment. It means relinquishing total control.
This resonated strongly with my own understanding of collaborative practice. Throughout this project, conversations have repeatedly returned to the tension between institutional structures and interpersonal forms of care. Rhia’s approach offered another model, one grounded less in authority and more in attunement. Their practice suggested that accessibility is not a checklist applied after the fact, but an ongoing process of listening carefully to what people require in order to feel held within a space.
When discussing how they support artists through Listen Gallery, Rhia repeatedly returned to intuition. Coming from both an artist-led and social care background, they described developing a heightened sensitivity toward vulnerability:
“You’re almost thinking about that first, like, what is the most vulnerable thing that someone could be experiencing in this.”
I found this framing particularly significant because vulnerability is rarely acknowledged openly within cultural work. Institutions often reward confidence, productivity, and endurance while obscuring the emotional and material precarity many practitioners experience. Rhia instead positioned vulnerability as the starting point for organising a space.
They spoke about developing care riders that account for different access needs and social experiences: pronouns, class background, educational access, and skill level. What interested me was the refusal to assume neutrality. Rhia acknowledged how easily institutional spaces reproduce hierarchies unless active consideration is given to the different realities people bring with them.
They explained:
“It becomes about really trying to understand what it is that that person needs in that time of their life and in their practice as a whole.”
What stayed with me afterwards was the scale of attention this requires. Care here is not abstract generosity; it is labour-intensive, observational, and deeply relational. Rhia described balancing practical support for the body alongside longer-term artistic development. The role becomes less about ownership or extraction and more about facilitation.
“How do we just be that conduit that gets them to wherever it is they want to go with their practice?”
I was particularly drawn to the word conduit. It suggests movement rather than control. The curator becomes a mediator through which resources, support, and opportunities can flow, without claiming possession over the artist or their work. This fundamentally disrupts competitive models of cultural production where value is often accumulated institutionally rather than shared collectively.
Rhia also spoke about exhibition openings in a way that challenged conventional gallery structures. Rather than treating openings as celebratory endpoints or networking events, they described them as “activation ceremonies.”
“It’s more of an activation of the exhibition.”
The language of activation shifts the emphasis away from passive spectatorship. Exhibitions become living environments activated through performance, gathering, and participation. Again, there was an insistence on movement and exchange rather than static presentation.
Accessibility remained central throughout this discussion. Rhia acknowledged the financial limitations many artist-led organisations face while still insisting upon access as a necessary consideration rather than an optional enhancement. What interested me most was the multiplicity of forms through which they approached this. The exhibition itself was only one mode of delivery.
They explained how radio became an extension of the gallery space:
“Whatever happens in the exhibition is then translated to radio format.”
I found this particularly moving because it reframed accessibility not simply as accommodation, but as transmission. The question was not only who can physically enter a gallery, but how the experience itself might travel outward beyond architectural boundaries. Radio becomes another sensory and communal form through which the work continues to exist.
Rhia described thinking carefully about the physical and emotional conditions of space: temperature, sound levels, seating, softness, whether someone is alone, and whether support is available nearby. These details might appear small individually, but together they construct the atmosphere through which a person experiences belonging or alienation.
What stayed with me most was their reflection on first encounters:
“Your first encounter with someone […] informs how they’re going to find their access in that space.”
I kept thinking about this afterwards. Access is often discussed administratively, through ramps, captions, policies, or funding applications. Rhia instead described access as relational and affective. A person’s ability to feel welcome begins with how they are greeted, spoken to, and held within an environment. Care exists not only in infrastructure but in tone, attention, and interpersonal exchange.
What I ultimately took from this conversation was a rethinking of what curatorial practice can be when rooted in listening rather than authority. Rhia’s approach suggests that programming is not simply the organisation of cultural events, but the ongoing construction of conditions in which people can meaningfully exist together. Sound, improvisation, care, and access all became intertwined within this understanding of practice.
This conversation continually returned me to the idea that care is not supplementary to cultural work, but constitutive of it. Listening itself becomes a political act: tuning into vulnerability, remaining open to adjustment, and building spaces that allow people to arrive as they are.