Global Dystopia sound art biennial 2026
Since 2018, Errant Sound e.V. has organized the DYSTOPIA Sound Art Biennial every two years as an international festival for contemporary sound art. Across its previous editions, the Biennial has presented more than 120 artists and approximately 60 projects. Initiated, curated, and organized by artists, the Biennial approaches sound art as a critical practice, foregrounding its social, political, and ecological relevance.
While the notion of dystopia originally referred primarily to speculative futures in literature and film, it has increasingly become a condition of the present. Climate breakdown, mass extinction, geopolitical conflict, authoritarianism, and widening social inequality have rendered dystopian scenarios an everyday reality rather than a distant possibility. Against this backdrop, the current edition, Global Dystopia, examines the aesthetic, political, and epistemological dimensions of listening in a world shaped by multiple, interconnected crises.
Bringing together artistic positions from diverse geographical, cultural, and disciplinary contexts, the Biennial explores the entanglements of ecological, social, and technological processes. The featured works investigate sound as a medium of knowledge, memory, and imagination, asking how listening can render complex realities perceptible. Rather than merely representing crisis, the projects foreground sonic practices that challenge dominant narratives, make hidden relations audible, and propose alternative ways of relating to the world.
Grounded in an expanded understanding of listening, the Biennial considers more-than-human relations, the environment as an acoustic field, and the material and political conditions of perception. What forms of knowledge become accessible through sound? How can listening reveal suppressed histories, marginalized voices, or ecological processes that often remain beyond perception? What role can sonic practices play in addressing climate change, extractivism, colonial continuities, or collective trauma?
Through exhibitions, performances, and an international symposium, the Biennial presents a multidisciplinary programme that brings artistic, scientific, and activist perspectives into dialogue. Its diverse formats create spaces for critical reflection, embodied experience, and transdisciplinary exchange. Sound is understood not merely as an aesthetic material, but as a method of inquiry, a mode of knowledge production, and a practice of relating.
The DYSTOPIA Sound Art Biennial positions itself as a platform for engaging with the ecological and societal transformations of our time. It invites audiences to reconsider listening as a practice of attention, care, and political imagination, and to understand sound as a means of reconfiguring our relationships with one another, with the more-than-human world, and with the planet we inhabit.
Mario Asef
Artistic Director
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Quote: Ami Ray. Indian author and spiritual teacher and a pioneer of the compassionate artificial intelligence movement. Source: Wikipedia.
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