DYSTOPIA Sound Art Biennial 2024

The DYSTOPIA Sound Art Biennial 2024 is focussing on the Indian subcontinent this year. Under the direction of Nida Ghouse and Georg Klein, 22 projects will be exhibited at HAUNT/frontviews and the GALILÄA Church from September 7th – 29th. The biennial is organised by Errant Sound e.V. and includes installations, performances, concerts and performance picnic in the Tiergarten. September 12th and 13th a symposium will take place at Errant Sound’s interim space in Wedding. From September 20th – 29th UdK sound art students will also be represented for the first time as part of the biennial at KUNSTRAUM Potsdamer Straße.

A set 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. While the cadence of a voice leads to a home left behind on a forgotten family cassette tape, 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.

Exhibition opening hours: Wed-Sun 2-7 pm, 7-29 Sept 2024

HAUNT frontviews
Kluckstraße 23A, Yard
10785, Berlin – Schöneberg

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