Sonic Acts Biennial 2026

Resident Olga Micińska is part of the exhibition that opens 6 February at W139, that explores how the notion of ‘home’ is being renegotiated by climate crisis, colonial histories, and forced displacement. It brings together installations, films, sound works, and performances that reflect on how land, bodies, and ecosystems are shaped and altered by systems of exploitation. By listening to the echoes left behind, it highlights gestures of love and connection with land and community as forms of resistance and repair.

In the work ‘Bad Luck to Every Magistrate, and Bad Luck to Every Gamekeerper’, Olga Micińska, together with Lower Levant Company merge bat calls, broadcasting, and encrypted messages to reflect the ecological catastrophes wrought by colonial warfare in the Eastern Mediterranean.

At Arti et Amicitiae the exhibition opens 7 February, and brings together works that move through grief, dispossession, and enduring forms of love. Alum Noor Abed participates with her film installation ‘A Night We Held Between’, that centres on ‘Song for The Fighters’, a recording found in the sonic archive of the Popular Art Center in Ramallah. The archive collects original sounds and songs from across Palestine, preserving an oral sonic history of folklore.

On 21 February, she will give a performance at If I Can’t Dance, together with Haig Aivazian, composed from sound, text, and movement: ‘Nothing Will Remain Other than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of this World’. Across an arc of guttural sounds, gasps, coughs, hums, and hisses, the artists work through the anatomy of voice – noses, mouths, larynxes, tracheae, and lungs – letting each organ introduce its own emotional and textual register.

On 20 February ‘Sounds of Skies, Forests of Instability’ opens at Het Documentaire Paviljoen / IDFA Institute. This satellite exhibition moves between immersive audiovisual storytelling and visceral sensory experience, bringing together two newly commissioned installations by alum Femke Herregraven and Sébastien Robert. Femke Herregraven presents ‘The Evacuated’, a simulation of a Dutch forest that rewrites itself in real time, where memory becomes volatile, time loops and mutates, and continuity breaks apart.

On 22 February Femke Herregraven and Sébastien Robert will engage in an artist talk. Drawing directly from their long-term research trajectories, they will discuss the methods, conceptual frameworks, and wider contexts that inform their work, guiding audiences deeper into the exhibition.

On 28 February and 1 March the symposium ‘Ecologies of Endurance’ takes place at the Stedelijk Museum, focusing on what persists in the wake of erasure in an epoch marked by genocide, devastation, and planetary destruction. On 1 March alum Yazan Khalili, cofounder of the Bethlehem- and Ramallah-based Radio Alhara, will reflect on the role of the contemporary institution, rooted in Palestinian cultural practices.

On 21 March, alum Aram Lee participates in ‘Regarding the Third Ear: VESSELS’ at Zone2Source, a multidisciplinary event comprising live sound performances and a roundtable discussion, convened by writer and curator Xenia Benivolski. Tracing the movement of toxicity through land, soil, and social structures, Aram Lee reveals metabolic processes that are otherwise obscured. Through the use of vinyl records – produced from PVC derived from fossil fuels – sound reproduction itself is located within extractive petrochemical economies, binding musical media to geological time and environmental degradation.