Last Sunday (29.03.) was the last day of Sonic Acts Biennial 2026. Inspired by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, this year’s theme, Melted for Love, explored the sounds of home: what it means to belong and to carry home inside of you. For the past month, Sonic Acts Biennial’s incredible programming proved to be one of the most exciting events happening in Amsterdam. Here are four stand-out events that will stay with me long after the festival has ended.
“Heart Rests Twice” – Concert 3
The third ‘Heart Rests Twice’ concert at murmur was with Kween, Nancy Mounir, and Virus2020 and it was focused on time as memory in motion, being carried on and passed on.
Kween (Ghaith Kween Quotainy)’s performance was extremely personal as it combined their newly developed work with archival material from recordings exchanged between their mother and grandmother in Syria in the 1990s. I loved the set-up with cassette player, the voices of the female relatives talking to each other, and the AV that was recorded by one of Kween’s friends. The whole performance felt like a childhood memory, it was nostalgic and intimate. You can watch the full performance here.
VIRUS 2020 (Rami Harrabi) challenged what traditions mean and re-imagined North African rituals by presenting electroacoustic performances with his handmade instruments. The space felt like entering a forest where the sounds of imaginary rustling leaves and distant animal calls were evoked by his instruments.
Nancy Mounir is a Cairo-based artist and her research was centred on the remains of home that are preserved in books, carved in stones or erased and overlooked. She choreographed the space in a circle as she played nature sounds with violin, piano, traditional Egyptian flutes and even a theremin.
Symposium Stedelijk: Sounds of Resistance
I was able to attend only the last session of the Symposium at Stedelijk, which was Block 4: Sounds of Resistance. I was extremely impressed with the programming as I managed to see Zifzafa by Lawrence Abu Hamdan with Amr Mdah and video designer, Busher Kanj Abu Saleh, Fabio Cervi and Listening Hymns: Sonic Antifascism by ILYICH.
It was exciting to see an alternative way of presenting symposiums and I loved that with the purchase of the ticket, visitors were able to see the solo exhibition πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα) by Danh Vo.
Zifzafa is a specific word in Arabic to describe the wind that shakes everything in its path. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s voice carried us through a video-game simulation of the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights or Al Jawlan. Abu Hamdan is the founder of Earshot – the first non-profit non-profit organization that fights for sound justice. Together with the saxophonist Amr Mdah and Fabio Cervi,a collaborator from Earshot, Abu Hamdan showed us the impact of green colonialism and how an innocent-looking wind turbine project can affect the local community due to the intensity of its sound.
Zifzafa is featured in the magazine Ecoes, which you can purchase on the Sonic Acts Webshop.
Ukrainian artists ILYICH (Anton Kats) concluded the symposium with Listening Hymns, a powerful spoken-word archive of voices that are marginalized and overlooked. I loved the deconstructed headphones which looked like the handles of an old phone. The ending felt like a manifestation of anti-racist, feminist, anti-fascist and abolitionist ideas. You can find the article “Resonance of Hope” that featured ILYICH in Ecoes magazine here. You can hear a snippet of the performance here on Radio Refuge.
Listening Room at Zone2Source
In Zone2Source, a hidden glass room in the heart of Amstelpark, the sound came from eight different speakers and moved around the room. The rays of sun peeking through the windows and ambient music, put us in a meditative state – a true kino for your ears!
“Heart Rests Twice”: Concert 4
The penultimate series at murmur of “Heart Rests Twice” was focused on what we mean by “intelligence” and how A.I. is being weaponised and used in daily life.
Flavia Dzodan presented Transatlantic Drift which combined her creative coding live with images from Argentina, near her hometown Beraztegui. She showed how algorithms work with sound and highlighted the term affective derivatives. You can further read her piece in Ecoes, called “Affective Logistics” where she researches how emotions are captured and standardized as if they are cargo.
Sondi was my personal favourite with the performance Non-User-Friendly that featured a soundtrack made by Kween. It started with her, in the corner, iPad in hand, trying to log in to a fictional AI chatbot website that supposedly “makes your life easier.” Moving to a gamer chair in the other corner of murmur, Sondi showed us the embedded biases of A.I., the hidden racism in the systems, the myth of neutrality of technologies. It culminated with a very strong A/V work that reflected on the ecological impact of A.I., human labour, human loneliness, and the dangers of “recognition.” You can read the interview by Tiiu Meiner here.
Sondi performing at murmur, credits to Angelina Nikolayeva
Lastly, the night ended with the Mexican artist Leslie García’s Saturn Spectrums which was a rework of 600 tapes of archive, called El Saturn Collection, recorded by the Afrofuturist Sun Ra. Leslie intervened in the collection through synthesizers, visual material of the sun, and artificial intelligence.
The Biennale program ended, however the exhibition “Between Fires – Irradiated Imaginations & Anti-Nuclear Solidarities” at Framer Framed will stay until May. Sonic Acts has an extensive research program that often hosts different events throughout the year and it is worth keeping an eye out for them!
