Dystopia Sound Art Biennial 2024

The Dystopia Sound Art Biennial, organised by Errant Sound and under the artistic direction of Nida Ghouse and Georg Klein for 2024, will take place from 7 to 29 September. The venues are HAUNT/frontviews in Schöneberg and the Galiläa Church in Friedrichshain.

The exhibition features sound installations, performances, and site-specific projects by over thirty participating artists from fifteen countries. Complementing the main exhibition, an accompanying event program will run on all four weekends.

Following previous editions in Turkey and Brazil, this year's Dystopia Biennial highlights sound art from Europe and the Indian subcontinent. The central exhibition, Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didn’t hear you, critically engages with canonized European sound epistemologies through diverse artistic positions.

In her curatorial statement, Nida Ghouse notes: “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.” The concept of dystopia, politically, socially, and ecologically charged, is positioned here as both a provocation and an invitation to imagine another world.

In resonance with the artworks, the symposium Sonic Futurisms, curated by Budhaditya Chattopadhay, provides insight into futurism in sound practices and thoughts from South Asia—traditions that impacted Western art music by figures such as John Cage, La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros and others in the 1950s and 1960s, often without due acknowledgement. The symposium examines futurism beyond dystopian visions, inviting new conceptualizations of possible futures.