How Art Galleries Are Learning to Listen
By Wim Langedijk for HURS
How Art Galleries Are Learning to Listen
HUR Reads is our definitive shortlist of the most prominent articles from around the web.
By HURS Team
1
Deeyah Khan
The Gentlewoman profiles Deeyah Khan, a documentary filmmaker who risks her safety to confront extremism through radical empathy. A Muslim woman of color, Khan engages directly with neo-Nazis and jihadists, seeking the humanity beneath hateful ideologies. Shaped by early racism, exile and artistic reinvention, her award-winning films argue that understanding, not outrage, is the most powerful tool for dismantling violence and changing minds.
THE GENTLEWOMAN
In her first-ever podcast interview, Hollywood powerhouse Donna Langley reflects on rising from a small-town childhood on England’s Isle of Wight to the top of a famously unforgiving industry. She speaks candidly about instinct-led decisions that defied the data and leading with integrity. Championing underdog stories and billion-dollar hits alike, Langley makes a compelling case for resilience, and finding your voice in rooms where you’re outnumbered.
ASPIRE WITH EMMA GREDE
Zachary Fine reflects on the eerie power of Helene Schjerfbeck in a major Met exhibition that reframes the Finnish painter as a singular modernist. Her cool and restrained spare portraits strip away likeness to reveal absence, silence, and psychological depth. Moving from naturalism to radical minimalism, Schjerfbeck’s work resists nationalism and art-historical boxes, offering instead a haunting meditation on aging, identity, and what it means to truly see.
THE NEW YORKER
Sophia Stewart revisits the audacious life of Margaret C. Anderson, the avant-garde editor who helped modernism take root in America, then walked away from it. Founder of The Little Review and a central figure in the U.S. obscenity trial over Ulysses, Anderson championed radical art at great personal cost. Stewart’s piece traces her startling pivot from literary firebrand to restless aesthete, raising provocative questions along the way.
THE ATLANTIC
Meredith Davis traces how sound system culture is reshaping the contemporary gallery, bringing Caribbean traditions of music, engineering and protest into institutional spaces. Looking at Peter Doig, Nari Ward and Alvaro Barrington, she argues that these installations do more than amplify sound: they activate listening as a shared, social act. In contrast to algorithmic consumption, sound systems reintroduce ritual and presence, challenging the white cube to become a place of connection rather than contemplation alone.