Sound Studies and Sonic Arts Exhibition

This year’s Master’s exhibition of the Sound Studies and Sonic Arts programme at the Berlin University of the Arts demonstrated a strong commitment to theoretical rigor. Grounded in artistic research, the exhibition presented intellectually rich and well-articulated sonic practices that adhere to established methodologies in sound art. As such, most of the works engaged with tropes of the sound art genre itself rather than with more experimental or technology-driven developments emerging in the field.

As it has become a tradition, the exhibition was held at the Collegium Hungaricum in Berlin-Mitte. The five-story building, which functions as the cultural hub of the Hungarian Embassy, provides an ideal venue for a sound art group exhibition. Consisting of a series of well-distributed and acoustically isolated rooms, including conference halls, small chambers, a patio, and a kitchen-like storage, the venue enables multiple sound installations and performances to take place simultaneously without significantly interfering with each other. While the exhibition showcased the distinct methods and techniques influenced by the diverse identities and international backgrounds of the artists involved, it also revealed common threads that pointed towards broader contemporary tendencies and aesthetic strategies in sound art.

Deconstructed ecologies, climate change, and more-than-human epistemologies were among the recurring topics. For instance, the ambitious and expansive work of Ruben Bass offered an interactive immersive experience that thematized the sonic environments of a homegrown ant colony. Part artistic research, part performative happening, part audiovisual installation, the work invited the audience to follow a thread of UV-reactive leaves, guided by the colony’s amplified sounds. At the end of the pathway, the ant colony itself was revealed, drawing attention to the social dynamics of these nonhuman entities. Likewise, Diana Fonseca’s multichannel installation explored the ecosystems of microbial organisms found in a Mexican lagoon, reflecting on the perception and memory of organisms and ecosystems before human existence. The subtle sounds captured through hydrophones created a delicate composition played through speakers below a water sample and accompanied by images of the organism’s original natural habitat. Similarly, working with quiet voices of remote ecologies, Sydney Christensen presented a multimedia, immersive installation based on field recordings from the Arctic. Accompanied by hanging white textiles and a still video projection, the installation reflects on the sensible quietness of these desertic locations, where human presence remains almost absent.

Some of the pieces focused on embodied approaches to the listening experience. For example, MINQ presented an installation in the kitchen room that invited the audience to step on an apocalyptic sculpture and experience the haptic aspects of low-frequency sounds. Likewise, Juan Pablo de Lucca recontextualized some traditional Argentine dances through a sound-reactive dance floor. Inspired by Brazil’s sound system culture, Kim R. Martins’ installation offered a physical and intense sensory experience through a sculptural arrangement of several speakers that played Latin American pop music rhythms at high volume.

Beyond climate catastrophe, other works addressed a range of topics relevant to the contemporary political landscape. Drawing recordings from the archive of radio transmissions from Chilean refugees in the GDR during the Pinochet dictatorship, Kika Echevarría presented an installation with radio antennas that explored situated and dislocated listening. Through the spatial configuration of the room, the audience was invited to tune into the transmissions and broadcasting failures, and to engage in a search for identity and memory construction. Salomé Lubczanski created a video game that challenged the idea of habitable spaces in Berlin and its relationship with LGBTQ+ communities. Alejandra Ríos Ruiz’s installation reflected on the construction and traces of memory, weaving together a personal perspective through sound recordings and textile embodiments with a feminist commentary on care work. Sonically, the voices are untangled not only into their acoustic spectral components but also into a material spatial sculpture of textile traces and embodied enunciations. Located in the Kreuzberg’s venue, the “West Germany”, Zack Hart’s video installation presented a fictional documentary, reflecting on various historical moments of national identity formation, remembrance culture, and Germany’s legacy of genocidal imperialism.

Most of the artworks showcased a strong conceptual framework that supported and furthered their material ideas. This reflects a broader trend within academia and art education, where theoretical grounding and process-driven practice are increasingly central to artistic production. Consequently, most of the pieces adhered to a rather conventional approach to established sound art methodologies: field recordings, soundscape composition, spatial, embodied, and immersive listening; accompanied by elements of other art forms such as sculpture, video, light, and scenography. The exploration of novel sonic compositional techniques and engagement with technological developments, such as artificial intelligence, algorithmic composition, experimental sound, and visual synthesis, were notably absent from this year’s showcase. However, the desire to distance oneself from homogenizing compositional techniques based on technological advances should not necessarily be viewed negatively. Rather, it is a sign of the maturity of an artistic genre that has built a consistent practice based on its own traditions and aesthetic strategies.