ISBN: 978-3-9823166-7-3
17 x 24 cm (softcover)
184 pages
Published: January 2023

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BUDHADITYA CHATTOPADHYAY is an artist, media practitioner, researcher, and writer. Incorporating diverse media, creative technologies and research, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues. Chattopadhyay has received numerous residencies, fellowships, and international awards. He is the author of four books, including The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Au- ditory Setting (2021), and Between the Headphones (2021). Chattopadhyay holds a PhD from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, and an ma in New Media from the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University. Currently, Chattopadhyay is a visiting professor at Critical Media Lab, Basel.

LUCIA FARINATI is an independent researcher and a curator who lives in London. She studied on the Curatorial Programme at Goldsmiths University of London (2004), and was awarded a PhD from Kingston University on the subject of Audio Arts magazine (2020). Her research focuses on dialogic practices and method- ologies investigating the role of listening at the intersection of art and activism, the history of the artist interview, and performativity in the context of sound and feminist archives. She has curated sever- al sonic art projects under the collective name Sound Threshold. She is the co-author of The Force of Listening, Errant Bodies Press, 2017. www.soundthreshold.org

BRANDON LABELLE is an artist, writer and educator, as well as founding initiator of The Listening Biennial and related Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and the poetic imagination, which results in a range of collaborative and para-institutional initiatives, including: Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998–2002), Surface Tension (2003–2008), Dirty Ear Forum (2013–), The Imaginary Republic (2014–19), The Living School (2014–16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), Communities in Movement (2019–), among others. In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publish- ing project. His publications include: 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).

KATE LACEY is Professor of Media History and Theory in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on radio history, media publics, and listening as civic action. She has published widely, including Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio and the Public Sphere, 1923 to 1945 (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Polity, 2013). She was a founding member of the Radio Studies Network and sits on the editorial boards of The Radio Journal and The International Journal of Cultural Studies.

ISRAEL MARTÍNEZ is an artist based in Mexico. Seeking to generate a social and political critical reflection, and often ex- ploring stealth as a communicative situation of deep relevance, Martínez works with sound to create pieces and projects materialized in multichannel audio installations, video, photography, actions or performances, texts, publications, and interventions in public spaces. In 2007, he was granted an Award of Distinction in Prix Ars Electronica, and in 2019, he was a winner of the ctm Radio Lab Call in Berlin. He has exhibited at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, MuseumsQuartier, macba, Moscow Biennale, tea Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, Los Angeles Con- temporary Exhibitions, among others. In 2012 he was part of the daad Artists-in-Berlin Program, and in 2014 of the residence program of MuseumsQuartier in Vienna.

SARA MIKOLAI is a Sri-Lankan German dancer and choreographer from Berlin and is currently based in Colombo. With a background in Bharatanatyam, today she extends explorations of body and space in interdisciplin- ary formats, which take form in performance, sound, video, writing and installation works. Through a practice of listening and research, her work focuses on a critical and poetic engagement with epistemol- ogies of dance through decolonial strategies, queer reclamations and ecological reflections. Sara grad- uated in Dance, Context & Choreography at hzt Berlin, as well as in the mfa in Performing Arts program at the Iceland University of the Arts, Reykjavik. She further holds a diploma in Bharatanatyam from the Oriental Fine Arts Academy of London. Currently she is engaged in the MPhil in Fine Arts program at the University of Peradeniya, in Kandy, Sri Lanka.

ALECIA NEO is an artist and cultural worker. Her collaborative practice unfolds primarily through installations, lens- based media and participatory workshops that examine modes of radical hospitality and care. She is cur- rently working on Care Index, an ongoing research focused on the indexing and transmission of embodied gestures and movements which emerge from lived experiences of care labour. Care Index has been recently presented at The Esplanade: Theatres by the Bay, The Listening Biennial, Assembly for Permacircular Museums (zkm, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe), New Season of Care (Asia-Art-Activism) and Presence of Mind (Gallery Lane Cove, nsw, Australia). She is the co-founder of Brack, an art collective and platform for socially engaged art. Active since 2014, her ongoing collaborations with disabled artists currently manifests as an arts platform, Unseen Art Initiatives.

DANIELA MEDINA POCH (born in Bogotá, based in Berlin) is an artist and researcher who likes to write. Through site-specific, re- search-based work, her practice explores unconventional approaches to environmental intersectionality, debordering and de-othering. Observing everyday life correlations between language, identities and territories, her work aims to deconstruct hegemonic discourses and categories which perpetuate asym- metric power relations. Daniela is currently part of the ma program at Kunst im Kontext - Universität der Künste Berlin, co-re collective and the Neue Auftraggeber network. Her collective shows include Raupenimmersatism, savvy Contemporary, End to End – Transmediale 2020 C& Center of Unfinished Business, Berlin, vii Bienal of Performance, Galería Santa Fé, Bogota, and Fatídico Festivo, Blue Project Foundation, Barcelona, among others.

LUÍSA SANTOS holds a PhD in Culture Studies by the Humboldt & Viadrina School of Governance, in Berlin, and an ma in Curating Contemporary Art by the Royal College of Art, in London. Luísa Santos is an Assistant Researcher, in Culture Studies / Artistic Studies, at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. An independent curator since 2009, she conducted research in curatorial practices at the Konstfack, in Stockholm, in 2013 and, since 2019, she is a research fellow at The European School of Governance (eusg), in Berlin. At the cecc, in which she is a senior researcher, she takes the roles of coordinator and artistic director of the 4Cs: from Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, which she has initiated with a consortium of 8 European institutions in 2017. She has curated numerous exhibitions with artists such as Miguel Palma, Nikolaj Larsen, Yorgos Zois, Ângela Ferreira, Amira Hanafi, Marilá Dardot, Jeppe Hein, Jane Jin Kaisen, and Rouzbeh Akhbari. Since 2018, she is the co-artistic director of the nanogaleria, an independent curatorial project which she co-founded with Ana Fabíola Maurício.

JILL J. TAN is a writer, artist, and researcher committed to collaborative practice and multimodal exploration through games, performance and poetics. As a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Yale University, she studies death and dying in Singapore, and works with the funeral profession. Jill also writes about dance and social forms of art. Jill’s work appears in Guernica, City and Society Journal, Brack, Ghost Proposal, My- nah Magazine, Palimpsest, and the edited volume Resistant Hybridities: Tibetan Narratives in Exile (2020). Her multimedia hybrid poetics project “Notes on the bicentennial of a f/l/ound/er/ing (2019)” was awarded the 2022 Theron Rockwell Field Prize at Yale.

YANG YEUNG is a writer on art and an independent curator based in Hong Kong. She founded the non-profit soundpocket in 2008 and is currently its Artistic Director. Her recent publications include “caring is a quality: on being touched by Alecia Neo’s Care Index” (for Dance Nucleus, Singapore) and an essay on Francis Alÿs’ solo exhibition Wet feet __ dry feet: borders and games (for Taikwun Contemporary, Hong Kong). She devotes herself to following how artists think, move, make and unmake sense of the world. She con- tinues to work towards juxtaposing contemporary art with ideas from the ancient and modern classics she teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The Listening Biennial Reader, vol 1: Waves of Listening
Edited by Brandon LaBelle

Within today’s intensely polarized environment, in which social and political debate often tends toward conflict or impasse, might listening enact an intervention? While focus is mostly placed on making statements, capturing history, and the importance of speaking out, 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 and ecologically-attuned relations, staggering exclusionary systems and human exceptionalism by way of empathic, attentional, and more-than-human orientations: to hear beyond the often fixed schema of self and other, us and them. Listening is an embodied power, it may open and hold, it may support and heal, and it may afford escape as well as compassionate action.

The Listening Biennial Reader draws attention to listening as a relational capacity, a philosophical and ecological proposition, a creative practice, and research method. This includes contributions by curators and artists from the first edition of The Listening Biennial, presented in 2021, along with a number of key scholars who offer critical reflections on cultures of listening. Listening emerges as a creative and critical force, or wave of attention, that contributes to maintaining the diversity of our social, creaturely adventure.

Including contributions from Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Lucia Farinati, Brandon LaBelle, Kate Lacey, Israel Martínez, Sara Mikolai, Alecia Neo and Jill J. Tan, Daniela Medina Poch, Luísa Santos, and Yang Yeung.