PV Sunday 31 May, 2-5pm
Continues 3-28 June 2026, Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm

Matt’s Gallery is pleased to present ZYX, a new audio installation by Anna Barham, her second exhibition at the gallery.

Barham works with sound and installation to explore language as it moves between material forms, technologies and bodies. ZYX centres around a voice recounting a psychedelic experience accompanied by a spatial soundscape of incidental, bodily, and environmental sounds. The listener’s body becomes part of the acoustic field, while lighting and material staging contribute to a heightened sense of perceptual instability, echoing the hallucinatory atmosphere of the narrative itself.

A woman's voice moves between clarity and fractured, associative phrasing, which she does not register as error. At times, language tumbles into rhythmic fragments suggesting thought unfolding through sound as much as sense. A small misunderstanding leads to an intense psychedelic experience; time loosens and events become difficult to order. She remembers “feeling up off the surface” and repeating the alphabet backwards as a way of keeping time. The world vibrates - a “delirious mantra chorussing through the grass”.

The work brings human and machine perception into dialogue by thinking through hallucination, contrasting hallucinatory states associated with grief or psychedelics with speech-to-text misrecognitions and fabrications of language. Barham created an audio filter to force such machine “hallucinations” by emphasising paralinguistic features of speech (hesitations, repetitions, breath, accent, and vocal strain) shifting attention from semantic meaning to the material qualities of voice. Algorithmic mishearings generated through this process became source material for the script, blending machine error with embodied recollection.

For Barham, it is precisely these textures and mishearings which hold the relational potential of the voice. What initially seems like a misheard text is in reality a new way of thinking and writing—in radical opposition to automatisation, standardisation and authority.

ZYX is supported by The Elephant Trust, and Ruskin School of Art