Xenia Benivolski is a writer and curator, FWO Fellow, and PhD researcher at LUCA / KU Leuven in Brussels, working between sound studies and visual art. Her work investigates the material and ideological lives of musical compositions and instruments as agents of political, spiritual, and territorial transformation, and how sonic artefacts register as living and sculptural forms – things with ‘thing-power’. Broader interests include the ontological status of instruments, the metabolism of monumental form, and the acoustics of memory.

She is a 2025 Research Fellow at the Orpheus Instituut for Advanced Studies and Research in Music and a 2026 Visiting Researcher at Harvard University. Recent projects include a 2024 research fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada on colonial architectures of sound, and public lectures at Tate Modern, CCS Bard, Kunsthall Trondheim, and Harvard. From 2021–2023, she curated You Can’t Trust Music, a digital programme for e-flux. Her writing regularly appears in Frieze, The Wire, and e-flux.