Sonic Acts Biennial 2022
Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 takes place throughout October across Amsterdam, with three weekends of performances, special commissions, workshops, an exhibition and symposium. For almost three decades, Sonic Acts has sought to celebrate new developments in electronic and digital artforms. Back in full force this year, the biennial international festival now stretches beyond its standard format. It emphasises collaborative knowledge creation, as well as experimental sound and moving image that attunes and responds to ecological thinking. Through thought-provoking interventions, the biennial asks how we can care, collectively and despite exhaustion of energies, for what we cannot see or understand. The three weekends around which the biennial revolves provide a slow immersion into the environmental humanities and contemporary art practices responding to the urgency of pollution.
Dates: 30 September – 23 October
Venues: W139, Zone2Source, Het HEM, Likeminds, Singelkerk, Oude Kerk, OT301
Tickets for Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 are available here.
On Friday 30 September we celebrate the launch of Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 – warmly inviting you to the opening of its exhibition one sun after another at W139 from 17:30. The evening questions how encounters with extraction, leakage and pollution might be rendered palpable – with an interactive open lab by artist Cesar Majorana and tasting sessions by designer Leanne Wijnsma. The evening also includes a collaborative performance by Loma Doom and G, directly responding to, and interweaving, the myriad of sonic elements present in the exhibition space. Entry to the opening is free!
one sun after another
Exhibition
Dates: 30 September – 23 October
Venues: W139, Zone2Source, Het HEM
The exhibition one sun after another takes place until 23 October across three locations: W139, Zone2Source and Het HEM. Participating artists and performers include Julian Charierre – nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2021 – Raven Chacon – the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for music – and the celebrated sound artist and electro-acoustic composer Tomoko Sauvage. Artist duo Louis Braddock Clarke and Zuzanna Zgierska premiere their new audio-visual installation Hard Drives from Space, which deals with geological developments, mineral extraction and colonialism in Greenland. In addition, artists Maryam Monalisa Gharavi and Sam Lavigne present their new work about the now more than 300,000 abandoned oil wells in the United States.
Featuring works and interventions by Andrea Galano Toro, Cesar Majorana; Danny Osborne, Patrick Thompson, Alexa Hatanaka, Sarah McNair-Landry, Eric McNair-Landry, Erik Boomer and Raven Chacon; Enrico Malatesta, Félix Blume, John Grzinich, Julian Charrière, Leanne Wijnsma, Loma Doom and G, Louis Braddock Clarke and Zuzanna Zgierska, Lucky Dragons (Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck), Maryam Monalisa Gharavi and Sam Lavigne, MELT (Isabel Paehr and Ren Loren Britton), Seline Buttner, and Tomoko Sauvage.
Read more about the exhibition here.
Flashing Horizons
Club Night
Dates: 30 September
Venues: OT301
The wide-reaching, future-facing club programme of Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 forges new connections as disparate soundworlds fuse and fission, blending cutting edge sound design with anatomised club rhythms. The programme seeks to offer a glimpse at the Horizon, its bright lights guiding us in a fraught state of crisis. Showcasing an international community of intrepid sonic explorers, Flashing Horizons moves through formal experimentation and playful fantasy at OT301 on the opening night of the Biennial.
Line-up: Kai Whiston, Async Figure, Soda Plains, Séverine, Soft Break, Akiko Haruna, Ausschuss, april222
Inner Ear(th)
Sound art
Dates: 7–9 October
Venues: Het HEM
From 7 to 9 October Sonic Acts hosts an expansive sound art programme at Het HEM in Zaandam, with a wide range of concerts, sound transmissions, installations, workshops and field explorations. As part of the programme Sonic Acts collaborates with INA GRM on the renowned loudspeaker orchestra Acousmonium, presenting live performances and legendary works from the GRM archive. This offers the rare opportunity to experience special diffusions of works from electroacoustic and Musique Concrete pioneers such as Iannis Xenakis, Bernard Parmegiani and Beatriz Ferreyra. Other Inner Ear(th) highlights include performances, installations and sound transmissions from Tomoko Sauvage, Felicia Atkinson, Samson Young, Russell Haswell & Hugo Esquinca and many others.
Featuring performances and works from Aho Ssan • Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh • Anthea Caddy • Arnaud Rivière • Beatriz Ferreyra • Ben Bertrand • Bernard Pamegiani • Bride • Dania • Félicia Atkinson • François Bayle • Hüma Utku • Iannis Xenakis • Jaap Vink • Jessica Ekomane • John Grzinich • Jules Negrier • Lance Laoyan • Leila Bordreuil • Maria Komarova • Matthias Puech • Michèle Bokanowski • Music Research Strategies and Dirar Kalash Nicole L’Huillier • Nina Garcia • Olivia Block • pantea, u-matic and telematique • PLF (Freya Brandhi, Lukas König and Peter Kutin) • Russell Haswell and Hugo Esquinca • Samson Young • Soundcamp • Tarek Atoui
Read more about the programme here
Leaving Traces
Symposium
Dates: 15 – 16 October
Venues: Likeminds, Singelkerk
The Sonic Acts symposium convenes over the weekend of 15 and 16 October with a series of talks, presentations and workshops by international artists and thinkers on the interconnected ways that pollution affects all things living and nonliving at Likeminds in Amsterdam. Leaving Traces asks how we can care, collectively, for others amidst toxicities that so often evade human perception. Each evening after the talks, the audience will be invited to digest the toxic entanglements and messy stories about climate emergencies in two programmes of sound performances, concerts and films, featuring a lineup of pioneering sound artists.
With talks, presentations from Antonia Alampi • Angeliki Balayannis • Aura Satz • Dani Admiss • Kent Chan • Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou and Agnès Villette • Nishat Awan • Mary Maggic • MELT (Isabel Paehr, Ren Loren Britton) • Nerea Calvillo • Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer
Read more about the symposium here.
Preemptive Listening
Screenings & performances
Date: 15 October
Venues: Likeminds
Preemptive Listening is an evening of sound experiments and expanded performances revolving around British experimental filmmaker and visual artist Aura Satz’s feature film in the making that reimagines emergency sirens in the age of manmade and ecological disasters. Coming off the back of her new album Two Sisters, the Canadian composer Sarah Davachi will present a solo electronic performance that explores the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space. In addition, Davachi will perform a piece accompanied by the contemporary, experimental music collective Nemø Ensemble.
Featuring Aura Satz • BJ Nilsen • Debit • Mazen Kerbaj • Sarah Davachi and Nemø Ensemble
Read more about Preemptive Listening here.
Breathtune
Performances
Date: 16 October
Venues: Singelkerk
During the evening programme Breathtune, Sweden-based sound artist and composer Kali Malone presents her new immersive work Does Spring Hide Its Joy. Following her critically acclaimed new album Living Torch, recently released on Portraits GRM, the performance sees Malone collaborate with Stephen O’Malley, the artist most notably known as part of experimental metal band Sunn O))), and Lucy Railton, British cellist and co-founder of the London Contemporary Music Festival. Staged in the church setting of the Singelkerk, the piece is performed by a trio of cello, sine waves and electric guitar.
Featuring Aine O’Dwyer • Ale Hop and Tatiana Heuman • Bloedneus en de Snuitkever • Kali Malone, Stephen O’Malley and Lucy Railton
Read more about Breathtune here
Practicum
Workshops
Multiple dates + venues
Practicum is a collaborative workshop series organised by Sonic Acts that focuses on applied knowledge, making from research and learning together. These gatherings are artist-led and emphasise collaborative, hands-on learning: attuning and creating together in ways that entangle modes of perception, production and knowledge-creation. Participants can critically engage with the Biennial as part of the Critical Writing Workshop, or learn to make analogue synthesisers with electronic garbage, or explore the possibilities of manipulating video with code.
Sign up for Practicum workshops here.