February 2 from 19:00 -22:00: join Harun Morrison (DAI, 2020) at W139 for the opening of The Spell of the Sensuous, the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024. Harun's contribution consists of two collaborative projects. We are so happy to see that for the evolving multi-authored publication Environmental Justice Questions, Harun teamed up with Olivia Abächerli (DAI, 2019) who contributed the drawings for 50 loose leaf cards. Which song reminds you of the collapse of our planet? Whose fantasies are we living in? Environmental Justice Questions is a compilation of questions for discussion and debate. A range of activists, writers, artworkers, architects, chefs, natural historians, and horticulturalists were invited to propose a question that could stimulate conversation. In a workshop on the third of February from 12:30–14:30, Harun invites you to engage in collective conversations and small-group discussions around questions chosen from this ongoing project.
Encompassing the curatorial underpinnings of The Spell of the Sensuous, the 2024 Biennial exhibition illuminates the fluid, porous boundaries between the human and more-than-human, embracing a multiplicity of ways of sensing and engaging with the thresholds of the body.
Taking shape across W139 and Looiersgracht 60 in the centre of Amsterdam, the exhibition brings together tactile sculptures, video works, and large-scale installations. Seeking to echo and give form to the ongoing environmental crisis, the featured artists examine dominant exploitative paradigms, the unexposed histories of contamination, bodily landscapes, and postnatural ecosystems.
At the same time, and drawing on feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad’s text On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am, the works propose tactics of ‘visual hapticity, sensory attunement, interspecies signalling, affectively charged multisensory dance and technological intimacies’. In this sense, they aim to bridge the gap between embodied encounters and those mediated by technology, uncovering hybrid ways of relating to the world and its ecosystems.
Following this tactile thread, at W139, the works of Pedro Matias, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, Annika Kappner, Brackish Collective, Jota Mombaça, Harun Morrison, Natasha Tontey, and touche-touche try to feel, together with a multiplicity of bodies, a connection to an ever-expanding community of beings and things. Centring the role of intuition, the artists evoke speculative communication technologies, (micro)bodily-landscapes, and matriarchal Indigenous cosmologies.
Within the exhibition, the movement of water offers a fluid, anti-colonial approach to thinking and listening, while the processes of decay are understood as a poetics of metamorphosis and transformation. Parallel to the exhibition, a series of public events, including workshops, performances, talks, and screenings, enter into dialogue with what Karen Barad names as ‘an infinity of others – other beings, other spaces, other times.’The public programme events and tickets can be found here.
Sonic Acts Biennial 2024: Programme & tickets
Harun's works: The Telepathic Butterfly
A micro-eco fiction exploring the unknown capacities of unidentified species.
- Micro-fiction printed on fabric, in collaboration with Rose Nordin, 2022–24
& Environmental Justice Questions
Which song reminds you of the collapse of our planet? Whose fantasies are we living in? Environmental Justice Questions is a compilation of questions for discussion and debate. A range of activists, writers, artworkers, architects, chefs, natural historians, and horticulturalists were invited to propose a question relating to environmental justice.
- Evolving multi-authored publication comprised of 50 loose leaf cards edited and organised by Harun Morrison, 2023 – ongoing
Contributors:
- Kat Cotta, Naho Matsuda, Rosalie Schweiker, Stella d'Ailly, Jane Trowell, Harun Morrison, Danika J. L Thomas, Graham Burnett, Holly Keasey, Vishal Parekh, Maymana Arefin, Anahi Saravia Herrera, Jessica El Mal, Åsa Össbo, Eva Sajovic, Owen Griffiths, Yasmine Ostendorf, Evie Muir, Fatima Alalaiwat, Mark Godber, Wood Roberdeau, Jared Gradinger, Jack Hannam, Chris Fremantle, Rowan Lear, Ireen van Dolderen, Taey Iohe, Sandra Man, Siriol Joyner, Marjet Zwaans, Lisa Stewart, Liz Rosenfeld, Nazakat Azimli, Sophie J Williamson, Olga Grotova, Inês Neto dos Santos, Manon Awst, Ashley Edwards, Satpreet Kahlon, Luiza Prado O Martins, Ayumi Paul, Gayatri Kodikal, Elisabeth Del Prete, Phoebe Davies, Joseph M. Pierce, Ada M. Patterson, Kajsa Sahlin, Rauna Kuokkanen, Max Troell, Luja von Köckritz, Angela YT Chan, Melissa Barton, Rachel Pimm, Kate McIntosh, Oliver Ressler, The Mycological Twist, Niamh Riordan, Raluca Voinea, Felicitas Zeeden, Mary Jane Edwards, Maxwell Ayamba, Katy Beinart, Rahima Gambo, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Rima Sonigara, Graham Harwood, Mandus Ridefelt, Jonas Staal, Borbála Soós, Adelita Husni-Bey, Gabó Bartha, Hannah Davey, Therese Keogh, Joey Holder, Ana Brotas, Andrea Ku, Gavin and Adrienne Wade, Diána Berecz, Katharine Stout, Rita Süveges, Jasmine Roha Wakefield, Kitti Gosztola, Rowena Harris
- Design: Cody Lee Barbour
- Drawings: Olivia Abächerli
- Commissioned by Mossutstallningar with additional support from V&A Dundee and APAP network.