Sonic Acts Biennial 2024
Encompassing the curatorial underpinnings of The Spell of the Sensuous, the 2024 Biennial exhibition illuminates the fluid, porous boundaries between the human and more-than-human, embracing a multiplicity of ways of sensing and engaging with the thresholds of the body.
Taking shape across W139 and Looiersgracht 60 in the centre of Amsterdam, the exhibition brings together tactile sculptures, video works, and large-scale installations. Seeking to echo and give form to the ongoing environmental crisis, the featured artists examine dominant exploitative paradigms, the unexposed histories of contamination, bodily landscapes, and postnatural ecosystems. At the same time, and drawing on feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad’s text On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am, the works propose tactics of ‘visual hapticity, sensory attunement, interspecies signalling, affectively charged multisensory dance and technological intimacies’. In this sense, they aim to bridge the gap between embodied encounters and those mediated by technology, uncovering hybrid ways of relating to the world and its ecosystems.
Following this tactile thread, at W139, the works of Pedro Matias, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, Annika Kappner, Brackish Collective, Jota Mombaça, Harun Morrison, Natasha Tontey, and touche-touche try to feel, together with a multiplicity of bodies, a connection to an ever-expanding community of beings and things. Centring the role of intuition, the artists evoke speculative communication technologies, (micro)bodily-landscapes, and matriarchal Indigenous cosmologies. Within the exhibition, the movement of water offers a fluid, anti-colonial approach to thinking and listening, while the processes of decay are understood as a poetics of metamorphosis and transformation.
Parallel to the exhibition, a series of public events, including workshops, performances, talks, and screenings, enter into dialogue with what Karen Barad names as ‘an infinity of others – other beings, other spaces, other times.’
More information about the exhibition you can find on the Sonic Acts 2024 website.
