DYSTOPIA SOUND ART BIENNIAL 2024
Aman Aheer, Zeerak Ahmed, böseblick ensemble, Moushumi Bhowmik, Padmini Chettur, Julien Clauss, Nico Daleman/Samuel Perea-Díaz, Rupert Enticknap, Jasmine Guffond, Devadeep Gupta, Heyse Ip/regiment, Alifiyah Imani, Nakul Krishnamurthy, Sukanta Majumdar, Jutta Ravenna, REProduce mit Rana Ghose & Hemant Sreekumar, Aarti Sunder, Suvani Suri, Tan Bone, Maarten Visser

and
Students from the Master’s program Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK)
Juliette Collas & Salomé Lubczanski, Diego Behncke, Ignacio Briceno, Hisako Nakaoka, Efthymis Naoumis, Julia Koffler, Salah El-Oweidy & Selim El-Sadek

curated by Nida Ghouse and Georg Klein

a project by Errant Sound hosted by frontviews



opening hours
7 Sep – 29 Sep 2024
Wed – Sun 2 – 7 pm
 

Entrance fee
Day Pass: 15€ (incl. catalog)
Reduced: 10€ (for students, recipients of citizen’s benefit, senior citizens over 65)
TICKETS
Performance events in HAUNT are included in the Day Pass
Children up to 12 years: free
Errant Sound / Miss Read: free entry for the installation/symposium


location

frontviews at HAUNT
Kluckstraße 23 A Yard
D – 10785 Berlin

and other venues

Galiläakirche
Rigaer Straße, 9/10
10247, Berlin – Friedrichshain

Errant Sound’s interim space
Miss Read
Gerichtsstr. 45
13347, Berlin

UdK sound art students presenation at
KUNSTRAUM Potsdamer Straße
Potsdamer Str. 65–67, 10785 Berlin

Venues Info + Tickets
 

 
social media

Instagram
@frontviews_
@haunt_berlin
@galilaeakirche
@dystopiabiennial
@errant.sound
@missreadberlin
@udkberlin_sounds
@kunstraumdigital

 

This project is profoundly supported by Senate Departement for Culture and Social Cohesion. It´s also made possible with the initiative of all the collectives and groups involved.


Programme
 
Vernissage no1 
at HAUNT
Sat 7 Sep 4 – 9 pm
free entry

Welcome speech at 5pm
by Nida Ghouse, Georg Klein
and
Opening performance
6pm and 8pm
by Heyse ip / regiment

Vernissage no2
at Galiläa Church:
Sun 8 Sep 

Opening performance
6pm by Hemant Sreekumar
8pm by Zeerak Ahmed

Many more events, a symposium, and a perfomance picnic here

Finissage
Thu 29 Sep 2– 9 pm
at Galiläa Church
Closing performance
REProduce: Rana Ghose with Nithin Shamsudin, Ruhail Qaisar et.al.
 
Full Events List
All projects
 


The Dystopia Sound Art Biennial, organised by Errant Sound and this year under the artistic direction of Nida Ghouse and Georg Klein, will take place from 7 to 29 September in HAUNT/frontviews in Schöneberg and in the Galiläa Church in Friedrichshain. Featuring sound installations, performances, and site-specific projects by over thirty participating artists from fifteen countries, the exhibition will be accompanied by an event program that runs on all four weekends. From 20 to 29 September at KUNSTRAUM Potsdamer Straße, students in the sound studies and sonic arts master’s programme at the Berlin University of the Arts will also be represented at the Biennial for the first time. On 12 and 13 September, a symposium in the interim space of Errant Sound at Miss Read in Wedding will round off the program.
 
After Turkey and Brazil, Dystopia Biennial 2024 presents sound art from Europe and the Indian subcontinent. The exhibition Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didn’t hear you raises questions about canonized European sound epistemologies through a range of positions. “If the German concept of Klangkunst has no equivalent in the South Asian
context, sound itself has cosmic significance and the culturally-coded labor of listening draws on long and diverse lineages,” says Nida Ghouse in her curatorial statement. Dystopia, a politically, socially and ecologically charged term, serves here as a provocation or an invitation to imagine another world.

In resonance with the artworks, the symposium Sonic Futurisms, curated by Budhaditya Chattopadhay, offers insight into the concept of futurism in relation to sound practices and thoughts from South Asia that influenced the Western art music of John Cage, La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, and others in the 1950s and 1960s, without recognition having been demanded until now. Among other topics, the symposium explores the under-discussed conceptualization of a future that goes beyond a dystopian vision. 



 
Curator Statement
 
Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didn’t hear you.

Pairs of loudspeakers flank each side of a pair of paintings but emit no sound. The monochromatic canvases are coated with cow dung. Captioned the low voice, these sculptural objects by Aman Aheer reference the slow silencing of the Muslim call to prayer from the Indian landscape and link it with the sustained violence faced by Dalits.

As quiet compositions in a sound art exhibition, they invite the listener to consider the material dimension of inaudibility and confront the medium of sound at its limits.

Borrowing its title from poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin, the exhibition Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didn’t hear you emerges from certain incommensurabilities that lie at the heart of the project of sound art. This Dystopia Biennial provides a frame wherein one sound art scene, with its specific references, reaches out to another. If the German concept of Klangkunst has no equivalent in the South Asian context, sound itself has cosmic significance and the culturally-coded labour of listening draws on long and diverse lineages.

Spread across two main venues, the works in the exhibition comprise a range of sound-based practices including installations, performances, and site-specific projects. Ears trained in folk, opera, contemporary improvisation, Carnatic, or Hindustani classical find temporal structures and visual forms for music in the proverbial museum. Excursions into deep time and extra sky yield shapes in sound for what neither images nor discourse can provide. Secrets are kept in languages once recorded but now deemed dead, and untold fairytales get sung out of a mix of noise and tenderness.

Nida Ghouse
 

 
 
related links

Dystopia Sound Art Festival 2024

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