FULL PROGRAM
Dystopia on Instagram

Venues
frontviews at HAUNT – Kluckstr. 23, A Yard, 10785 Berlin
Galiläakirche – Rigaer Str. 9, 10247 Berlin
Errant Sound at Miss Read – Gerichtsstr. 45 / backyard left, 13347 Berlin
KUNSTRAUM Potsdamer Straße – Potsdamer Str. 65–67, 10785 Berlin / Exhibition 20–29.9.24

Opening Hours
Wed-Sun 2–7 pm

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 program 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.

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 Dalit
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

Symposium SONIC FUTURISMS
The Sonic Futurisms symposium contextualizes the thematic impulses of Dystopia Sound Arts Biennial 2024 in resonance with the exhibitions, performances and other concurrent events. Among other discursive lines of inquiry, the symposium explores conceptualizations of a futurity that transcends dystopic visions, under-discussed within the contemporary social, political, and environmental realities of the subcontinent and globally—from oppressive far-right governments enforcing societal divisions based on racist or casteist discriminations to increasing climate-related migration. How do we hear possible futures from South Asian perspectives that have been marginalized in sonic epistemologies? Could they generate new energy for coping and emancipation from dystopian visions of tomorrow? The Dystopia Sound Arts Symposium will nurture and address these questions with guest speakers as well as participating artists and curators.
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

EXHIBITION: SUBTEXTS
With the exhibition Subtexts, students from the Master’s program Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts are participating in the Dystopia Biennial for the first time. As part of the project seminar “Dys/utopian Realities” with Professor G. Klein, seven works were independently developed, planned, and realized for the exhibition space of studierendenWERK. Among various sociopolitical, perceptual-psychological, and epistemological themes, the intensified discussion around freedom of opinion and art in Germany since the Gaza war started plays a role here, gaining a particular resonance in studierendenWERK’s underground car-park space.
Georg Klein

Team
Curators: Georg Klein, Nida Ghouse, Julia Gerlach, Jeremy Woodruff, Suvani Suri
Symposium Curator: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Production: Mario Asef, Dimitra Charizani
Technical management: Antonino Modica
PR: Laura Mello
Graphics: arc
Website: Georg Werner

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