Sonic Acts

Artist, researcher, and cultural activist Yazan Khalili presents the lecture about Radio Alhara , but his talk primarily focuses on cultural structures and organisations – institutional and other – how they are built, funded, maintained, managed, etc. Drawing on his role as co-founder of this Palestine-based radio station – and his artistic practice in which he examines institutions as politicised...

Ex Aqua is a live improvisational performance by theorist and poet Ayesha Hameed and musician Aimée Theriot. Their piece invites the audience into what Palestinian artist Bint Mbareh calls ‘aggressive listening’, exploring the concept of ‘exaqua’ – a term coined by poet M. NourbeSe Philip in Zong! to describe a watery equivalent of exhumation, or the act of reclaiming from the earth. Through poetr...

Drawing from his forthcoming text Notes on the Third Ear (to be published by Urbanomic in 2026), musician, artist, and theorist Steve Goodman (Kode9) updates latent themes from his influential book Sonic Warfare to reflect on the politics of vibration within, poised upon, and beyond thresholds of audibility. From sonic booms and drone warfare to acoustic detection and machine listening, Goodman tr...

In her performative lecture Deep Time Soundings , researcher, curator, artist, and educator Margarida Mendes traces the rapidly changing ecology of Portugal’s Tagus River – a landscape marked by pollution, dam control, and eucalyptus monocultures that alter the river’s hydrology and desiccate surrounding lands. Developed with the Natural Contract Lab and in consultation with ProTejo, her research...

Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 Symposium Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 28 February 2026 Writer and theorist Flavia Dzodan presents Affective Logistics , a research project examining how computational infrastructures precondition, capture, and route emotion as logistical matter. Tracing genealogies from military command systems and Taylorist models of efficiency to domestic technologies of optimisation, sh...

Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 Symposium Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1 March 2026 How can we understand speech and sound as situated? And how might we speak, write, and listen across our mother tongues? In her talk, pantea (Pantea Armanfar) shares a process of developing Maram-Nameh – an evolving, multilingual guide and living archive that partially traces silences across histories and geographies, enga...

Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 Symposium Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 28 February 2026 In the performance lecture Politics and Desire, Violence and a Governance of Love , Salomé Voegelin asks whether love and political leadership can coexist, or whether political desire is always drawn toward violence and control. Taking the rise of contemporary authoritarian figures as a starting point, she questions wh...

In the lecture Sonic Acts for the End of the World , theorist and writer Eleni Ikoniadou confronts a world in which state authoritarianism, fascist policing, ecological devastation, and live-streamed genocide have become normalised and legitimised as governing principles. Faced with forms of violence that are not only enacted but also mediated, aestheticised, and absorbed into the systems of power...

Listening Hymns: Sonic Antifascism by ILYICH (Anton Kats) is a performative spoken-word archive. The project is the residue of the artist's multi-year research exploring sound and listening as generative practices within the research trajectory of Sonic Antifascism , and asks: how can sonic practice articulate antifascist cultural work? Tracing ways of listening through the words of artists, m...

Tune in for episodes two and three of Sonic Trax, Sonic Acts' new podcast series, where we explore the organization's rich archive. Join us as we uncover the captivating stories behind the evolution of sound art and its lasting impact, bringing these insights closer to you!  In the two-part podcast Touched by Sound: Re-imagining the Legacy of Michel Waisvisz , hosts Sève I.V. Janssen and Flav...

Tune in for episodes two and three of Sonic Trax, Sonic Acts' new podcast series, where we explore the organization's rich archive. Join us as we uncover the captivating stories behind the evolution of sound art and its lasting impact, bringing these insights closer to you!  In the two-part podcast Touched by Sound: Re-imagining the Legacy of Michel Waisvisz , hosts Sève I.V. Janssen and Flav...

What does it mean to DJ an archive? In the debut instalment of a new podcast series by Sonic Acts, junior curator Hannah Pezzack interviews Ruben Verkuylen ( The Social Lover ) about his DJ set from the 2024 Biennial, where he reimagined Sonic Acts archival material through turntablist techniques, sample pads, and effects. Recorded live at Het HEM and later broadcast by NTS Radio, his set drew upo...

Accompanied by her modular synthesiser, xenologist scholar and artist Adriana Knouf 's presentation is proposed as a love letter. Eschewing the binary logic that pervades Western thinking, Knouf argues that all beings – trans*, cis, and xeno – are in a constant process of flux and transformation, always already more-than-human. From syringes of ​oestrogen to the trajectories of satellites orbiting...

In Louisiana, artist, activist, writer, and architectural researcher Imani Jacqueline Brown uncovers Black antebellum cemeteries – portals to recover and remember Afro-diasporic ecological praxes. Between 1820 and 1865, enslaved people were forced to clear Louisiana’s primordial forests to make way for the expansion of cane. They preserved small sections of forest where their loved ones were inter...

Following lectures from scholars Astrida Neimanis and M Murphy at Sonic Acts Biennial 2024, both were joined on the Symposium stage by artist Sissel Marie Tonn for a conversation addressing many topics, from pollution and violence, to language, creative methods, and direct action. Guided by questions from the audience, they also address indigenous knowledge and research, discussing how to negotiat...

Author and researcher Astrida Neimanis gives the opening lecture at Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 Symposium. In a time of extinction and climate catastrophe, how are we to feel? Feeling intensifies, but also wavers. Feeling's temporal container pulses, its membrane now more porous: the past seeps in, the future jumps the gun. Feeling anything swims in the wake of what once was, and is burdened by what...

In this performative lecture, artist Juan Arturo García presents his research project about a nuclear reactor in Colombia. Radioactivity, earthquakes, and applications like geochronology are used as props to explore the paradoxes of trying to visualise inaccessible phenomena. García’s translation, or poetics of displacement, taps into the present cultural, mystical, and political consequences of t...

Filmmaker and researcher Solveig Qu Suess traces how water, infrastructure, and documentary film intertwine. Her lecture follows the flood pulse of Southeast Asia's main river – the Mekong – since the 1990s. Construction of hydroelectric dams has caused drastic changes, reconfiguring downstream landscapes to accommodate for the expansion of plantations. Instead of being governed by the seasons, Su...

Researcher, educator, and curator Margarida Mendes ’ lecture asks how our understanding of the environment is shaped on different scales from the way we sense, to social protocols and intergovernmental infrastructures. For Mendes, a collective sense of our surroundings is formed by practices and policies that mould our ecological pedagogies and politics, giving space (or not) to future worlds. Thr...

In 1978, in the Dutch towns of Veghel and Almelo, two groups of migrant women from Turkey were involved in simultaneous labour disputes. They asked their employers for collective agreements, regular work hours, higher pay, and holiday time. The labour-intensive work of plucking chicken feathers in Almelo and peeling onions in Veghel has been lost in institutional archives – only traces of these hi...

Moving through extended material and research from the making of the video work 'Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum', filmmaker Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva explore their creative collaboration. The second instalment in the Elemental Cinema series , which takes up the elements to reimagine the world otherwise, 'Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum' is a film dedicated to tenderne...

In her live multichannel performance ‘How to Love a Tree’, Hira Nabi weaves together whispered narratives from sylvan landscapes, misty mountain sides, ghosts of extraction and British imperialism, inviting us into forest time. Part of an ongoing artistic project, launched in 2019, ‘How to Love a Tree’ documents the former colonial hill stations in the blue pine forests of Murree and the Galiyat r...

Starlings sing new songs when they grow-up in persistently polluted lands. Desires and sexualities shift. The relations of our bodies go far beyond the skin, stretching outwards to lands, waters, non-humans, ancestors, and those yet to come. We make one another in difficult conditions. What can we become? How can we dream of land-body desires when fossil fuel capitalism and colonialism continues t...

This conversation takes as its starting point Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner's most recent film, 'My Want of You Partakes of Me'. The film, which was on view as part of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 exhibition at W139, is the third instalment of a trilogy. It proposes that digestion is a fundamental condition for organisms to be in the world, a process with physiological and psychological dimens...

Writer, musician, and xenologist, Adriana Knouf is the first (known) trans artist to send artwork into outer space. Her multidisciplinary practice is inspired by, amongst many other sources, queer/feminist science-fiction, trans-activist zines from the 1970s, and The Xenofeminist Manifesto (2015) by the international collective Laboria Cuboniks. She is the founding facilitator of the tranxxenolab,...