First edition - 2021
listening to, listening out forWithin today’s intensely polarized environment, in which political and social debate often tend toward conflict or impasse, might listening enact an intervention? While focus is often placed on making statements, capturing history, and the importance of free speech, listening is radically key to facilitating dialogue, understanding, and social transformation. To listen is to extend the boundaries of the familiar, the recognized, and the known. In addition, listening affords more egalitarian, decolonized, and ecologically-attuned relations, staggering exclusionary systems and human exceptionalism by way of empathetic, attentional, and more-than-human orientations: to hear beyond the often fixed schema of self and other. Listening is a power, it may open and hold, it may support and attend, and it may afford escape and deep friendship. And yet listening is greatly undervalued and neglected across society.
THE LISTENING BIENNIAL draws attention to listening as a relational capacity, a philosophical and political proposition, a creative practice, and research framework. From radical empathy to weak ontology, poetic refusal to diasporic resistance, eavesdropping to intimate envelopment, listening wields a creative and critical force that may contribute to maintaining the diversity of our social adventure.
Financial support for the Listening Biennial has been received from the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, and the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen. Additional funding and support has been received from Oficina de Autonomia Network, and Errant Bodies / Errant Sound Berlin.
Artists
- OCTAVIO AGUILAR & DIEGO MARTÍNEZ GUILLÉN
- GEORGES AZZARIA
- KHYAM ALLAMI
- WAH-YAN AU & YANNICK DAUBY
- ANTOINE CHESSEX & MÉLIA ROGER
- CYCLOPS (CARLOS AMORALES & ENRIQUE ARRIAGA)
- BIDISHA DAS
- EMCSI
- JULIE FAUBERT
- MICHELE CHU
- TANIA CANDIANI
- ISURU KUMARASINGHE & SARA MIKOLAI
- JEPH JERMAN
- NANDITA KUMAR & JOSEPH KAMARU
- ORSOLYA KAINCZ
- YOLANDE HARRIS
- ALECIA NEO
- ALEXANDRE ST-ONGE
- ANGEL NEVAREZ & VALERIE TEVERE
- BÁRBARA LÁZARA
- FERNANDO VIGUERAS
- JOCELYN ROBERT
- RAHELEH (MINOOSH) ZOMORODINIA
- SANDRA MONTERROSO & MANUEL ESTRELLA CHÍ
- SHARON LEE
- SURABHI SARAF
- MENE SAVASTA
- WANTANEE SIRIPATTANANUNTAKUL
- ZIAD MOUKARZEL
- TAO G. VRHOVEC SAMBOLEC
Partners
- Aerial, Bergen
- 1983, Hong Kong
- Ayer, Guadalajara
- TheCube Project Space, Taipei
- Investigaciones del Futuro, Buenos Aires
- Errant Sound, Berlin
- Noise N Roses, Budapest
- AMEE, Madrid
- Culture Monks, Kolkata
- L’École d’art of Université Laval, Quebec City
- Generator Projects, Dundee
- Space21, Kurdistan
- Klank.ist, Istanbul
- Liquid Architecture, Melbourne
- TaFMA, Nagaland
Curators
- Yang Yeung
- Israel Martínez
- Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
- Brandon LaBelle