Sonics and Scenics: Sound Art and Artistic Film Festival - June

About the event

In the summer, the nooks and crannies of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw will resonate with songs, spells, noises, stories, acoustic shadows, and conversations during a series of events based on the action of invisible waves shaping the full experience of various places, landscapes, and architecture. The program, curated and produced by The Wapping Project from London and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, includes interventions, installations, performances, film screenings, and discussions, including a series of new sound art pieces commissioned from artists working in Poland and the UK, as well as a set of short films by Irish artist and director Mairéad McClean, who lives in Bath, based on silent film materials from the Polish Home Movies Archive of the Museum of Modern Art. Barbara Kinga Majewska and Una Lee will create special audio guide tracks for the Museum, taking listeners on sound journeys through concrete stairs and imagined corridors. Nikki Sheth will transfer soundscapes from the MSN branch at the home of architects Oskar and Zofia Hansen in Szumin to the foyer of the building at Marszałkowska 103 using an eight-channel sound installation composed of nighttime field recordings. Aleksandra Słyż will shake the new concrete of the building. And Chu-Li Shewring will transform the tower leading to the Kinomuzeum into a buzzing nest of termites burrowing into concrete walls. New films by Mairéad McClean, presented as contemporary and historical "film chronicles" before cinema screenings throughout the summer, are a kind of audio documentation of archival images depicting fragments of everyday life in post-war Poland: seaside holidays, playgrounds, farewells in parking lots, shared meals, and gestures of tenderness. Working with silent 8mm and 16mm film reels, McClean reflects on how memory sounds. Instead of reconstructing the reality of lost intimate moments on damaged and scratched film, she evokes phantom traces of breath, murmurs, and vibrations of people together in the film frame. New sound pieces and films will be presented during a four-day public program (June 26–29) along with film screenings, live performances, and discussions. 🎤 In the auditorium, Gascia Ouzounian, professor of musicology at the University of Oxford and lecturer and tutor in music at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, will lead a series of meetings with sound artists titled Kitchen Conversations, where they will discuss their creative processes. 🎥 In the cinema, artists, filmmakers, and sound designers such as Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Mairéad McClean, Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind, Chu-Li Shewring & Adam Gutch, and Katarzyna Szczerba will present their latest films. 🎶 Each evening of the public program will conclude with a live concert. This includes the Thursday opening ceremony, organized in collaboration with the Ephemera Festival. Performers will include Antonina Nowacka with her band, Barbara Kinga Majewska, Karolina Kobielusz (alias Hermeneia), Teoniki Rożynek with Martyna Chojnacka, and Una Lee with a group of singers from the Warsaw chamber choir Sirenes. 🎧 In the final days of the Sonics & Scenics festival (September 20–21), there will be the premiere of a new music album by Teoniki Rożynek, specially commissioned for the festival, a live performance by Aleksandra Słyż, and a performative lecture by Jennifer Walshe. Participation in events in the museum lobby and cinema tower is free thanks to collaboration with the Audi brand. Tickets and passes are required for events organized at KINOMUZEUM. The festival, organized by The Wapping Project in London and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN), is part of the UK and Poland Season 2025 and is supported by the British Council.