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Sonic Acts is supported by

An interdisciplinary arts organisation based in Amsterdam.

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Biennial 2026

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Sonic Acts

Sonic Acts Biennial 2026

Adelita Husni-Bey is an artist and pedagogue whose practice draws on anarcho-collectivism, theatre, and legal anthropology. She organises workshops and produces artworks using non-competitive pedagogical models within the framework of contemporary art. Involving activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, poets, and educators, her work creates temporary sites for collective study and rehearsal.

She represented Italy at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 and has exhibited as part of _New Photography_ at MoMA, _The Eighth Climate_ at the 11th Gwangju Biennale, and _Really Useful Knowledge_ at Museo Reina Sofía. A 2020–22 Vera List Center Fellow, her research examined how pandemics reshape social relations. For Sharjah Biennial 16 in 2025, she produced _Like a Flood_, a film installation on water extraction, infrastructural afterlives, and adaptability.

She is currently developing a long-term research and performance project on Porto Marghera’s petrochemical plant, exploring toxic legacies and citizen science, and has recently undertaken a residency at Ocean Space.


Adelita Husni-Bey. Photo by Matteo Cattabriga.

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Adelita Husni-Bey

Festival Weekend

Exhibition

Niamké Désiré (aka Aho Ssan) is a Paris-based artist. After studying graphic design and cinema, he began composing electronic music and developing his own digital instruments. In 2015, he received the Foundation France Télévision Prize for his soundtrack to the film _Ingha Mago_ and went on to collaborate on several projects with IRCAM and INA GRM in France.

His debut LP _Simulacrum_, first presented at Berlin Atonal 2019, was released in 2020 via Subtext Recordings. The record draws on Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra to confront the contrast between society’s ideals of inclusivity and the lived experience of growing up Black in France. His work has been presented at institutions including Lincoln Center, La Maison de la Radio, CTM Festival, MACBA, Berlin Atonal, and the Kraków Philharmonic. Subsequent releases include _Rhizomes_ on Nicolas Jaar’s label Other People in 2023, and _Ego Death_, a collaborative album with Polish cellist and composer Resina released on Subtext Recordings in 2025. Across these works, Aho Ssan continues to explore sonic complexity, identity, and collective experience through a deeply personal yet expansive compositional language.
Aho Ssan was a resident at Sonic Acts’ Spatial Sound Residency in 2025.


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Aho Ssan. Photo by Christopher Bouchard.

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Aho Ssan

Spatial Sound Concerts

Listening Room

Spatial Sound Evening 2

Sonic Acts Biennial 2024

Aimée Theriot is a Mexican musician, sound artist, writer, and organiser based in Amsterdam. Her practice begins with listening, treating sound as a vibrational and sculptural medium. Moving between melody and texture, noise and structure, she explores the thresholds where harmony fractures and detail emerges. Working with live electronics, e-cello, voice, and field recordings, Theriot’s compositions draw from free improvisation, ambient, ASMR, and experimental sound traditions. Her work has been presented internationally in festivals and galleries, with releases on Sofa Music, Editions Verde, True Blanking, Unheard Records, and Relative Pitch Records.

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MusicianMusician, Sound Artist, Writer and Organiser

Website

Aimée Theriot

Looiersgracht 60 Exhibition Opening

Symposium

Symposium Block 2: Politics of Vibration

Ecoes #7 Launch Event 

Alterlife: Sewage and Mud event

Alina Schmuch creates artist’s books and video installations. Her ongoing video series on water infrastructures examines how landscapes, architecture, technology, and physical bodies intersect with both visible and hidden systems.

She studied Media Art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) and has been a fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Schmuch participated in the Hydromedia artistic research project, and is currently part of the BPA// Berlin Program for Artists. Her work has been presented in exhibitions and screenings at Urbane Künste Ruhr, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the Akademie der Künste Berlin, ZKM Karlsruhe, the MAK Center in Los Angeles, Rupert Centre for Art, PLATO, and the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. Among other awards, she has received the Visual Arts work stipend of the Berlin Senate and the MAK Schindler Scholarship in Los Angeles.

Alina Schmuch participated in the Rupert x Sonic Acts ALTERLIFE residency in 2024–25.


Alina Schmuch. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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Alina Schmuch

Ameneh Solati is a research-based artist and architect whose practice investigates the spatial manifestations of power and resistance. She leads a design studio at Design Academy Eindhoven and is an editor-at-large at _Failed Architecture_.

Her writing includes _Wetlands of Resistance_, published by e-flux Architecture in 2023, and her work has been presented at Stroom Den Haag in 2025, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in 2024, and the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021. Solati holds a master’s degree in architecture from the Royal College of Art in London.

Ameneh Solati participated in Sonic Acts’ Overexposed residency in 2023.

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Ameneh Solati. Courtesy of the artist.

Ameneh Solati

Amr Mdah, born in Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights, is a saxophonist and composer whose music brings together the worlds of jazz and Arabic traditions. His sound is defined by a rare sensitivity: instead of forcing styles together, he uncovers the common roots between East and West, building a rich and immersive soundscape.

Through inventive arrangements and a unique blend of instruments, Amr allows the saxophone to move fluidly between Arabic melodies and jazz harmonies, building a rich and immersive soundscape. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Jazz Performance and a master’s in Contemporary Improvisation from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Having performed on stages locally and internationally, Mdah now focuses on his own projects, composing music that combines intricate detail with rhythm and groove. His performances invite listeners into an experience that is soulful, original, and alive.


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Amr Mdash. Courtesy of the artist.

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Amr Mdah

Symposium Block 4: Sounds of Resistance

Anton Filatov’s artistic practice explores speculative narratives through the interplay of light, video, and sound.

He has contributed to the light design of media installations and performances by artists including Theresa Baumgartner, Chris Watson, Tony Myatt, Matt Lambert, and Michèle Lamy. Filatov has appeared at festivals such as Atonal, Unsound, and Draaimolen. He also ran Hania Rani’s audiovisual show across venues including Somerset House, the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, TivoliVredenburg, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center.

His current scenographic work seeks to expand the boundaries between digital, physical, and performative media, crafting immersive experiences that merge sound, light, and space.

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Anton Filantov. Photo by Irina Sharkadii.

website

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Anton Filatov

Expanded Experience

Arjuna Neuman is an artist and writer whose work moves across film, installation, and essay forms to address questions of ecology, history, and global justice. Often working collaboratively with the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva, Neuman explores the entanglement of climate catastrophe, colonial violence, and the possibilities of sensing and thinking otherwise.

He has presented mid-career surveys at MACBA, Munch Museum, and Belkin Gallery, with a forthcoming exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern. His solo exhibitions have taken place at Kunsthalle Wien, CCA Glasgow, The Showroom, Whitechapel Gallery, Istanbul Modern, and MAA, among others. He has participated in major international exhibitions including the Berlin Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, Bergen Assembly, and the Venice Biennial, as well as film festivals such as Berlinale, Images Festival, and Docslisboa. In 2024, he won the Artist Moving Image Prize at Les Rencontres Internationales Festival and was a fellow at Villa Aurora. In 2022, he was a fellow at the Flaherty Seminar.

As a writer, Neuman has contributed essays to Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, _The Journal for New Writing_, _Concord_, _Flaunt_, _LEAP_, _Hearings_, and e-flux. A forthcoming monograph will be published with Archive Books. He is also the founder of Archive of Belonging, a platform supporting migrants and refugees.

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Photo courtesy of Arjuna Neuman.

Arjuna Neuman

Ayesha Hameed is a London-based artist and writer whose work spans video, sound, textiles, performance, and text. Her practice explores the legacies of indentureship and slavery through the geographies of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Working through speculative and mnemonic approaches, she examines how media can transform the body into one that remembers. Recurrent motifs of water, borders, and displacement trace stories of migration, materiality, and the shifting relations between human beings and what they imagine as nature.

Recent exhibitions and commissions include Bonniers Konsthall, Kunstinstituut Melly, Zeitz MOCAA, the Liverpool Biennial, and the Dakar, Lubumbashi, Momenta, and Gothenburg biennials. She is co-editor of _Futures and Fictions_ published by Repeater in 2017 and co-author of _Visual Cultures as Time Travel_ published by Sternberg and MIT Press in 2021. Upcoming publications include _Radio Brown Atlantis_, which will be released by the Center for Art, Research and Alliances; _Black Atlantis_, forthcoming from Strange Attractor and MIT Press in 2025; and a poetry collection with 87 Press in 2026.

Hameed teaches on the MFA in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is Professor of Artistic Research at Uniarts Helsinki.


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Photo Courtesy of Ayesha Hameed.

Ayesha Hameed

Biennial Reader

Beatriz Ferreyra is an Argentinian composer born in 1937, working with electroacoustic and acousmatic music, creating compositions for concerts, films, videos, documentaries, dance, and music therapy.

From 1963 to 1970 she worked at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) of the ORTF Research Department under Pierre Schaeffer, where she collaborated on his _Solfège de l’Objet Sonore disc_ (1967). In 1975 she became a member of the Collège de Compositeurs, created by the Groupe de Musique Experimentale de Bourges (GMEB). She has received prizes in international experimental music competitions and has served on juries for several of them.

Ferreyra’s work has been released on numerous labels in France and internationally.

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Beatriz Ferreyra.

Soundcloud

bandcamp

Beatriz Ferreyra

bela is a musician and performance artist from Paju, South Korea, based in Berlin and Prague. Their work merges electronic music with _pungmul_, a Korean folk tradition rooted in agricultural rituals and social movements, combined with raw vocals influenced by extreme metal. Using heavy distortions and guttural cries, bela turns _pungmul_ into a ritual of queer rage and grief. 

Their debut album _Noise and Cries 굉음과 울음_ (2024), co-released on Subtext and Unsound, combines avant-garde basement experiments with ambient compositions reflecting on the precarity of life in South Korea, queer identity, and survival. bela develops audiovisual performances with Theresa Baumgartner and Lukas Feigelfeld and contributes improvised vocals to AKA HEX (Aïsha Devi and Slikback). Their solo and collaborative works have been presented at Berghain, CTM Festival, Unsound Kraków, Rewire, Schauspielhaus Zürich, and other venues across Europe and beyond.
As a DJ, bela explores deep, heavy rhythmic structures across bass, dubstep, grime, and UK garage. They co-run Sorrow Club, an event series based in Seoul, combining music and non-music formats. 


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bela. Photo by Camille Blake.

bela

Benjamin Thigpen is a composer and electronic musician who makes experimental music for loudspeakers. He does not consider himself to create this music, but rather to find it – to help it manifest and take form, like a gardener. His work is not based on concepts or logical thinking, but on the pure physical and spiritual experience of sound. He no longer believes in words or in saying something through music – instead, it is the sounds themselves that speak, sing, and dance.

For Thigpen, noise is a manifestation of truth – a way to be in immediate and total connection with the real, to participate in the opening of what is undisclosed and unexplained, to be drawn into a vortex of primal energy. More and more, his musical inspirations are the movements, shapes, and sounds of nature.

He has composed in major electroacoustic studios, performs internationally both solo and in collaboration, and he teaches computer music at Arts². His recorded works include _human for scale_, released in 2005 by EMF Media, _divide by zero_, released in 2011 by Sub Rosa, and _flux_, released in 2017 by empreintes DIGITALes.


Benjamin Thigpen. Photo by Emilio Vavarella.

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Electrocd

Benjamin Thigpen

Bernard Parmegiani was a French composer and sound engineer, born in 1927, who passed away in 2013. His work played a defining role in the development of electroacoustic music. Beginning his career as a sound engineer for French television, he joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) after meeting Pierre Schaeffer. Following a training period, during which he assisted composers such as Iannis Xenakis and Luc Ferrari, Parmegiani became a permanent member of INA GRM from 1959 to 1992.

Working from his own studio, Fabriquasons, he continuously expanded his practice in step with technological advances – moving from analogue to digital tools while retaining a distinctly personal sound. Over more than 80 concert works and 200 compositions, Parmegiani treated sound as a living material, collaborating with jazz musicians, instrumentalists, and artists in film, theatre, video, and dance.

He composed extensively for cinema, animation, television, ballet, and radio, and created the Roissy Airport jingle, which was heard for more than 35 years. Parmegiani’s rigorous yet intuitive approach to sound continues to influence generations of electronic and electroacoustic composers.

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discogs

Bernard Parmegiani 

Spatial Sound Evening 1

Bernardo Gaeiras is an artist, designer, and researcher whose work focuses on ecology, sound, and speculative design. For nearly a decade, he has operated at the intersections of public policy design and decentralised culture in Lisbon.

His practice spans multiple spatial and temporal scales, exploring how sound and technology mediate relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. Currently pursuing a PhD in Digital Media at the Interactive Technologies Institute, his research investigates bioacoustic sensing and situated design as tools for ecological reflection.

Gaeiras has performed at venues including the Amsterdam club Trouw and the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian (CAM), and has exhibited at MAC/CCB, Xuzhou Museum, MUDAM Luxembourg, and the Stedelijk Museum, among others.

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Bernardo Gaeiras.

Bernardo Gaeiras

BJ Nilsen is a Swedish composer and sound artist based in Amsterdam. His practice centres on field recording and soundscapes, focusing on the sound of nature and its effect on human perception. Recent works have explored the acoustic dimensions of urban and industrial environments, including collaborations with filmmaker Karl Lemieux.

Nilsen has also worked with Chris Watson, Jóhann Jóhannsson, choreographer Örjan Andersson, and visual artist Femke Herregraven. His compositions, sound design, and scores span theatre, dance, television, and film. With a discography extending over three decades, his  albums include _Irreal_ (2021), released on Editions Mego, and _True than Nature_ (2025), released on Ideologic Organ. 

BJ Nilsen was a resident at Sonic Acts’ Spatial Sound Residency in 2025.


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BJ Nilsen

Busher Kanj is a composer, producer, and sound artist from Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights. His work focuses on electroacoustic music, blending elements of Arabic folk, orchestral composition, electronic sound, and environmental recording.

Driven by an interest in the relationship between composers and their sonic environments, he explores how individuals and communities both shape and are shaped by the soundscapes they inhabit – reflecting distinct identities, memories, and experiences.

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Busher Kanj_by_Hosam Alshaer.

YouTube

Busher Kanj

buulbuul works in the realms of sound-making, poetry, and image. The duo, comprised of Kazakhstani artists Haider Timur and yourfriendkas, uses Central Asian traditional instruments, modular synths, and voices to mimic the sounds and movements of animals – geese, swans, and humans. In doing so, they craft folk imaginaries as an alternative to existing aural traditions surrounding mourning and burials.

In 2024, buulbuul undertook a joint radio residency at JaJaJaNeeNeeNee Radio, and their piece _Nargis-e Mastana_ was subsequently performed as part of the event _Voice as Landscape_ at Perdu in Amsterdam.

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buulbuul. Photo credits Zinmong Studio.

Website yourfriendkas

Instagram yourfriendkas

Website Haider Timur

Instagram Haider Timur

buulbuul

C. Lavender (Lavender Suarez) is an interdisciplinary sound artist, sound healing practitioner, and educator based in New York City.

She is the author of _Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives_ (2020), a contemplative artist’s workbook that explores how listening can spark creativity, foster self-awareness, and cultivate mindfulness. Bandcamp describes her music as having 'curative powers', yet it is also confrontational; 'primed to change you whether or not you want it to.'

In 2022, she premiered _Oneness_, a meditative spatial audio composition created for a 192-speaker Wave Field Synthesis system at A+E Lab in England. C. Lavender has held three pivotal roles that closely align with her artistic practice: she served as the first sound design educator at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, managed the studio and archive of one of the largest private vintage synthesizer collections in the U.S., and assisted the late composer Pauline Oliveros.

She has been an artist-in-residence at Wave Farm, Pioneer Works, Harvestworks, and Kurimanzutto Gallery, A+E Lab, and Elektronmusikstudion (EMS). C. Lavender’s music can be found on the labels Editions Mego, iDEAL Recordings, Ecstatic Peace!, and RVNG Intl., among others.

C. Lavender was a resident at Sonic Acts’ Spatial Sound Residency in 2025.

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Photo courtesy of C. Lavender.

C. Lavender

Open Call: Feedback Loops Workshop 

Cara Mayer, also known as Cardboard Lamb, is a DJ and writer who creates narrative radio, research-based audio essays, and sonic collage. Taking up thematic frameworks, she weaves together electronics, wave and folk mutations, film fragments, field recordings, and poetry to create immersive, narrative-driven soundscapes.

Mayer is a resident at Mutant Radio in Tbilisi, where her bi-monthly show takes inspiration from Italo Calvino’s _Invisible Cities_, using the 1972 novel as a point of departure for speculative listening. She also programmes for Radio Tempo Não Pára and has collaborated with Future Intel, Pinkman Records, Operator, WORM, and Rewire Festival.

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Cara Mayer. Photo by Marysia Swietlicka.

linktree

Cara Mayer

Feedback Loops

Chris Watson was a founding member of the influential Sheffield-based experimental music group Cabaret Voltaire in the late 1970s. Since then, he has developed a particular and enduring interest in recording the sounds of animals, habitats, and atmospheres from around the world.

As a freelance composer and sound recordist, Watson specialises in creating spatial sound installations that evoke a strong sense and spirit of place. His installations have been commissioned by international galleries and festivals including Sheffield Millennium Gallery, Opera North, The National Gallery, The Royal Opera House, The Louvre, the Aichi Triennial, and Dark Mofo.

In 2013, he received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers.