26 June – 21 September – sound installations, with programme of public events from Thursday 26 to Sunday 29 June
20 - 21 September – finissage of the festival
Over the summer months the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw will resonate with sonic landscapes, songs, incantations, stories, echoes, acoustic shadows and conversations during a festival of sound arts and artist film focusing on the invisible waves shaping the experience of places and underpinning the image-centred culture in which we live. The programme curated and produced collaboratively by The Wapping Project, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, brings together interventions, installations, performances, screenings and discussions, including a series of newly commissioned works in sound arts by artists working in Poland and the UK.
Barbara Kinga Majewska and Una Lee will create paths for the museum’s audio-guide taking listeners on sonic journeys through concrete and imaginary staircases and passageways. Nikki Sheth will bring the soundscapes of the iconic summer house of the architects Oskar and Zofia Hansen in Szumin into the foyer of the museum through an immersive eight-channel sound installation composed of nocturnal field recordings, while Aleksandra Słyż will rattle the new concrete of the building with scores for the venerable synthesisers of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. And Chu-Li Shewring will infest the tower leading to the cinema with screeching and buzzing of a chorus of human and insect voices humming in harmony and dissonance.
The festival, presented by The Wapping Project, London, and the Museum of Modern Art (MSN), Warsaw, forms part of the UK/Poland Season 2025 and is generously supported by the British Council.
Programme of the finissage:
Saturday 20 September, 8:30 PM
13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music, performance-lecture by Jennifer Walshe
Over the past decade composer and vocalist Jennifer Walshe has worked with, through and around AI, creating a body of work by turns playful and anarchic, serious and thought-provoking. ULTRACHUNK, a collaboration with the artist and technologist Memo Akten, involved Walshe spending a year creating a bespoke dataset of videos of herself vocalising, in order to train an AI to generate an audiovisual version of herself to improvise with live. In A Late Anthology of Early Music, Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, an album of the year in The Wire, The Quietus and The Irish Times, she used machine learning to re-imagine the early history of Western music. For The Text Score Dataset 1.0, Walshe spent five years collecting over 3,000 text scores to test the ability of different models to produce Fluxus 2.0.
In early 2024 Walshe’s long-form essay 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music was published by Unsound. The essay offers a unique framework for looking at artwork made using AI, arguing that we should regard such artworks from multiple positions, simultaneously.
The evening at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw will begin with a short talk discussing 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music, and why AI can be viewed as fan fiction, an energy drink, and, however improbably, boobs. This will be followed by a performance of material from A Late Anthology of Early Music, Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, an experience which sees Walshe try to navigate the uncanny valley of machine-mediated versions of her voice. The event will conclude with a Q&A.
Sunday 21 September, 4:00 PM
Launch event of Center of Gravity, Teoniki Rożynek’s music album on analogue cassette, commissioned especially for the Sonics & Scenics festival
Throughout the summer of 2025, Teoniki Rożynek undertook a sonic exploration of the new building of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw to compose an album rooted in her practice of attentive listening to reality, interweaving field recordings with fragments of sonic debris and sound waste she has collected over the years. In collaboration with Joanna Duda, she focused on the hidden acoustic landscape of the museum’s underground levels, -1 and -2, spaces normally inaccessible to visitors. Suspended between Warsaw’s metro stations and the dense network of the city’s energy and water infrastructure, the museum’s underbelly reveals a unique sound environment. The recordings capture hums of water flowing in pipes, hisses, and crackles of the “lungs” and “veins” of the building that allow the new museum to function as if it were a living organism.
The performance will take place in the auditorium on level 0. The cassette release, co-published by The Wapping Project, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and Aural Prism will be available for purchase at the museum’s bookstore.
Sunday 21 September, 5:00 PM
Concert of new composition by Aleksandra Słyż, featuring instruments from the Polish Radio Experimental Studio
Drawing on her quadraphonic sound installation The Long Pause Gives Way, commissioned for the Sonics & Scenics festival, Aleksandra Słyż presents a live performance of a new composition created for and with the instruments from the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (SEPR). The new work resound the studio’s historic equipment, which has remained silent for over two decades, including Bruel & Kjaer signal generators, the EMS Synthi VCS 3, the Telefunken M-15 tape recorder, the iconic Moog 35A modular synthesizer, and SEPR’s signature – gold plate reverb EMT 240. All material is tuned using a rational tuning system, highlighting a unique meeting point between distant musical histories. This dialogue between the past and the present invites reflection on how historical tools and ancient tuning systems can shape new sonic experiences today.
The concert marks the culmination of several weeks of on-site work by Aleksandra Słyż, during which she has been researching, restoring, and experimenting with SEPR’s legendary instruments. It also serves as a prelude to a forthcoming program of workshops and concerts at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, leading up to the long-awaited recreation of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio.
The finissage programme of the Sonics & Scenics festival has been curated and produced by Marta Michalowska and Thomas Zanon-Larcher (The Wapping Project), Jagna Lewandowska and Anna Litwińska (MSN Warsaw), Piotr Macha and Radosław Sirko (Aural Prism). Sonics & Scenics is a collaboration between The Wapping Project, London, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, supported by the British Council through UK/Poland Season 2025.