Stefan Roigk, Brandon LaBelle, Isuru Kumarasinghe & Sara Mikolai
Stefan Roigk
„UNPREDICTABLE“ — Electroacoustic Concert for Everyday Objects, Voice, Microphone and Computer
Stefan Roigk (* 1974) is a sound artist based in Berlin.
In his artistic practice, Stefan Roigk deals with the intermedial interweaving of electroacoustic music, sound installation, musical graphics and text-sound composition. The resulting works approach sound as a field for artistic and aesthetic research, taking it as both their departure point and central medium. Roigk’s artistic focus lies on the dynamic staging of context-related fragments of everyday existence, which he combines in the sense of visual music to create stage-like spatial compositions with an implicit underlying narrative sense. In his work, Roigk reflects on his own living and production conditions, while tracing the subjective construction of reality and investigating the political potential of aurality. In addition to his work as a composer and fine artist, Roigk is member of the artist collective Errant Sound and an active part of the organizing team of the artspring festival. He is involved in cultural policy as a spokesperson for the Coalition of the Independent Art Scene Berlin (KdFS), the bbk berlin, the Initiative : Kulturelle Bildung stärken! and is the second deputy chairman of the inm - initiative neue musik berlin.
Brandon LaBelle
“Dreams of the other citizen”
Meditation on the creative solidarities and resistant imaginaries found within particular histories and songs. Through following the voices and movements of others, the work gives narrative to the art of survival and practices of hope.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including Communities in Movement (2019-23), Oficina de Autonomia (2017-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-22), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015).
Isuru Kumarasinghe & Sara Mikolai
“Coming to our senses”
In their work, Sara Mikolai and Isuru Kumarasinghe are interested in movement and sound as ways of sensing and exploring the relationships between the body, spatial surroundings and emotive presence. They explore how they affect and resonate with and through each other, having developed their listening practices through their different angles of and backgrounds in dance and music. Bringing these into their collaboration, they engage with principles of sonic vibration and somatic movement as interrelated practices, exploring how they correlate and are affected by surrounding environments. Acknowledging the subjectivity of human perception, they propose a re-connection of neglected sensory abilities and vulnerabilities, intending to shift modern and anthropocentric notions of cognitive versus bodily comprehension. Isuru and Sara have been co-creating several works together and work in various formats of collaboration, grounded in their common interest in sound, movement and listening practices, as well as their shared understanding of their artistic practices as a way of being in the world and responding to cultural political norms and planetary concerns.
Credits:
Creation & Performance: Sara Mikolai & Isuru Kumarasinghe
Special thanks to Gaia Martino
Isuru Kumarasinghe is a self-taught musician and sound artist from Sri Lanka. Currently he is a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. He mainly works with electro-acoustic music improvisation, field recordings, as well as sound installations and performances. Through a listening practice, in his work, Isuru focuses on the experience of sound perception and sound movements. He creates tools to transmit and affect philosophies of listening as well as the relationship with the body into sound production. He explores the possibilities, qualities, and effects of sound, particularly its spatial relations and its impact on humans being constantly immersed in sound. He takes a critical approach to music influences that dominate and marginalize other local music practices particularly in the context of Sri Lanka and South Asia. In his work today he explores resonance as a means of understanding the interplay between the body, architecture, and sound, for which he has created his own resonator instruments. Moreover, he is specifically intrigued by the movements of sound, which has sparked his curiosity in the field of dance. Kumarasinghe extensively collaborates with musicians, dance, theater, and filmmakers and is a co-founder of the Musicmatters collective in Colombo. Belonging to the first wave of experimental music and sound art in Sri Lanka, his work has been deeply influential to the local music and sound art scene.
Sara Mikolai is a Sri Lankan-Tamil-German choreographer, dancer, and interdisciplinary artist from Berlin. In her work, she activates sensory experiences and situations through dance, performance, and sound. She also explores other media through the lens of choreography and the body. Sara’s work is deeply rooted in her critical engagement with Bharatanatyam: after learning this form since early childhood through her mother in her dance school within the Sri Lankan Tamil refugee and migrant community in Berlin, Sara has embarked on a long-term reflective process on dance and society. Addressing the intricate history, contemporary performativity, and narratives of this specific dance context has prompted her to investigate various approaches to engage with the dance, both in terms of content and aesthetics. It has remained equally important to her to explore ways to keep engaging with it and to challenge Western notions of dance and contemporaneity. Since 2015, Sara’s practice has evolved to explore dance through a listening practice, delving into the intricate relationship between movement and sound. She examines how these elements intertwine through the use of Salangai footbells, Nattuvangam cymbals, Sollukaṭṭus (the vocalization of rhythmic syllables), and rhythmic foot patterns, aiming to understand how they influence the body, correlate with, and are activated by movement and ultimately create a performative situation. In this practice, she proposes dance to be not only witnessed as a visually aesthetic experience but also as a resonating, somatic, poetic, and relational act. Currently, Sara is conducting research as part of the MPhil in Fine Arts program at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka.
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For its third edition, The Listening Biennial brings together sonic, visual and performative works by an international cohort of artists for a week-long program of collective listening. Aiming to foster experimental, restorative practices, The Listening Biennial offers a hospitable, participatory space for deep breaths and slow talk, and for listening-with the vibrant matters of our planetary world. Comprised of audio works and artistic installations presented throughout the building of Ballhaus Ost, informal talks taking place under the trees, and an evening program of live performances and experimental sounds, we invite audiences into a listening journey full of poetic voices, stories, noises and songs.
More on the full program at Ballhaus Ost.
And further details on the Listening Biennial 2025 program.