Role:
Exhibitions Curator 
as part of Curatorial Team SAB2026

Date & Location:
06.02–29.03.2026
W139, Arti & Amicitiae, Rozenstraat, Amsterdam, If I Can’t Dance  

Participating artists: Alina Schmuch, Adelita Husni-bey,  Maeve Brennan, Diana Policarpo, Bernardo Gaeiras, Lower Levant company & Olga Micińska, Ameneh Solati, Huniti goldox, dominique white, noor abed , arjuna neuman, nour shantout,  egle budvytyte, eliana otta,  christian nyampeta, kivu ruhorahoza, nikolay karabinoyich,  Haig Aivazian, Katherina Gorodysnka, Mohamed abdelkarim, Urok Shirhan,  

The Sonic Acts Biennial exhibition manifests as three curatorial orbits at W139, Arti et Amicitiae, and Rozenstraat. It materialises the Biennial’s theme Melted for Love – an exploration into how home is negotiated under climate catastrophe, colonialism, and forced displacement – bringing together installations, films, sound works, and performances that attend to how land, bodies and ecosystems are shaped and altered by extractive forces.

Spanning three neighbouring venues, the exhibition holds space for grieving what has been harmed or lost – human and non-human life – by militarisation, colonialism and dispossession. By listening for what remains, it turns to gestures of love for land and community as a practice of repair after imperial violence. Linking ecocidal and genocidal tactics, the works ask which infrastructures invade, destroy, and sever lands and lives; and how afflicted ecosystems respond – by fleeing, shifting direction, regrouping, or resisting?

At W139, Lower Levant Company (Emiddio Vasquez and Peter Eramian), in collaboration with Olga Micińska, amplify bat calls, radio recordings from military bases, and folk songs, merging them with encrypted messages to reflect the ecological catastrophes of colonial wars in the Eastern Mediterranean. In a related exploration, Adelita Husni-Bey works through a pedagogical practice invested in anarcho-collectivism. Her work restages the colonial archives of Italian fascism, exposing damaged water infrastructures and resource extractivism in Libya – legacies inscribed in the embodied memory of both the oppressed and the oppressor. Diana Policarpo and Bernardo Gaeiras in their newly commissioned work speculate on future regenerative stations of the former transatlantic station of Bugio Lighthouse, allowing radiophonic transmissions of the inhabiting microspecies. Alina Schmuch extends the reflection on extraction and anthropocentrism in her newly commissioned installation produced between Vilnius and Amsterdam, exposing the manipulation of water systems in times of drought and raised sea levels. Moving through what is channelled below and above ground, her work reveals how the body is removed from ‘natureculture’. Maeve Brennan’s ongoing research on salt mining deep below the earth’s surface questions the violent writing and archiving of Western imperial history.

From floating microorganisms to rhizomatic forests, love is not merely a human project. At Arti et Amicitiae, the exhibition searches for traces of love, material and otherwise, hidden within pockets of grief, loss, and dispossession. The work of Nour Shantout stitches threads of ancestry and land defence, piercing the present-future occupation forces with Palestinian embroidery. Continuing this reflection on perseverance, Noor Abed’s film, a farewell song – located within the ongoing Nakba, the systemic displacement of Palestinians from their homeland since 1948 – activates a collective rhythmic attunement that forms and sustains community while Dominique White summons nautical myths of Black diaspora, where the wake is led by the ‘shipwrecked’ voices in the depths of the Atlantic. Similarly, in Ameneh Solati’s commissioned work, trembling waters of the Euphrates lament lost lands and their fugitive inhabitants. In the newly commissioned installation by HUNITI GOLDOX, mangrove forests across the globe’s intertidal zones confide a regenerative intelligence of love that exceeds the distractive logics of contemporary technologies. Lastly, Arjuna Neuman follows the drifting dust of Californian wildfires, attuning to the stories of indentured migrant labour and the quiet solidarities that emerge.

How do we grieve or memorialise something that is still happening? How do dispersed communities maintain their ancestral knowledge and memory while collectivising to seek justice? At Rozenstraat, working at the intersection between moving image and movement research, Eglė Budvytytė gathers communities of death-care, preparing to become part of the soil and air. Extending this attunement to our surroundings, Eliana Otta, working within the ancient forest of the Peruvian Amazon, collaborates with numerous non-human species to imagine sounds that remain after Indigenous land defenders have been murdered. A poetic tribute to the un/dead – a collaboration by Christian Nyampeta and Kivu Ruhorahoza – reflects on bonds that extend beyond a single lifetime. In his sound walk, Nikolay Karabinovych maps an audio collage across Amsterdam. Each location becomes a portal to an Odessa double, harbouring a ghost geography.