As part of the festival of sound arts and artist film Sonics & Scenics we commissioned six artists from across Poland and the UK to make new sound works in response to the new building of the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners, and a suite of short films by Bath-based Irish artist and filmmaker Mairéad McClean, drawing on the silent footage from the Polish Archive of Home Films held within the Museum.
Barbara Kinga Majewska and Una Lee create paths for the museum’s audio-guide taking listeners on sonic journeys through concrete and imaginary staircases and passageways. Nikki Sheth brings 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 rattles the new concrete of the building with scores for the venerable synthesisers of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. Chu-Li Shewring infests the tower leading to the cinema with screeching and buzzing of a chorus of human and insect voices humming in harmony and dissonance. Teoniki Rożynek composes a new music album weaving together field recordings from the Museum with scraps of sound junk and sonic waste she has been collecting over the years. And Mairéad McClean’s new films are an act of listening to the archival images capturing fragments of ordinary lives in Poland in the post-war era: seaside holidays, playgrounds, goodbyes in car parks, shared meals and gestures of affection.
The programme is a partnership between The Wapping Project and the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, and forms part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, supported by the British Council.
Aleksandra Słyż is a composer, musician and sound engineer. In the recent live performances, she has been focusing on finding subtle connections between acoustic instruments and modular synthesisers, creating rich and diverse drone structures, slowly yet intensely pulsing and resonating within the surrounding space and the listener. Interactive sonification systems are another large part of her artistic practice. Her works have been presented at festivals and venues internationally, including at Rewire Festival; CTM; Aarhus Festival; Unsound; Fiber Festival; NODE; Warsaw Autumn; Kyiv Music Fest; ORF musikprotokoll; Open Source Art Festival; The Royal Concertgebouw; Fylkingen; Ancienne Belgique; Stadtcasino Basel, The National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra; Kunsthalle Helsinki; Aarhus Domkirke; Meet Factory; Dom im Berg; silent green; Kunsthal Gent.
Barbara Kinga Majewska is a classically trained musician, composer, and creator of sound installations, specialising in contemporary vocal music. Across live performance, composition and studio experimentation,Majewska explores the intersections of voice, sound, and text, testing the boundaries of communication and expression. Her practice focuses on the non-musical contexts of singing and plays with the cultural constructs surrounding the act of signing. Her works have been presented at national and international institutions including: the National Museum in Warsaw; Zachęta National Gallery, Warsaw; Museum der Moderne Salzburg; Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra; Kunsthaus Graz; House of Contemporary Culture Marres; and Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, among others. She is a regular guest at festivals such as Donaueschinger Musiktage, Warsaw Autumn, Unsound, Sacrum Profanum, and Malta Festival.
Chu-Li Shewring is a filmmaker, sound designer and sound artist. Her films combine interview, archival and documentary material with delicately crafted soundscapes to create realities that straddle fact and fiction. Her most recent film, Wendy, 2023, was made in collaboration with artist Frances Scott and commissioned by TACO!, London. Fawley, co-directed with Adam Gutch, won Best International Short Film at Sheffield DocFest, 2022, while Working to Beat the Devil was nominated for Best Short Film at International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2014. As a sound designer, she has collaborated with artist filmmakers including Anagram, Siobhan Davies, Jeremy Deller, Beatrice Gibson, Steve McQueen, Ben Rivers, Frances Scott, and Aura Satz. And for this contribution to the field of artist moving image she was awarded the Jules Wright Prize at the Jarman Award 2017.
Mairéad McClean is a UK-based Irish visual artist with a career of over thirty years. Her practice includes film, photography, drawing, and installation, through which she explores how individuals navigate systems of control, how we remember, and how perception is shaped by the language of filmmaking. She frequently incorporates found footage, historical and family archives, filmed performances, and televisual material into her films and installations. In 2021–22, she was the Decade of Centenaries Artist in Residence at the Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin. In 2014, she won the inaugural MAC International Art Prize. Her works have been acquired by major public collections including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Arts Council of Ireland, and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Nikki Sheth is a sound artist and composer. Her work aims to give voice to the environment and foster a deeper connection with the natural world through field recordings, soundscape composition and spatial audio installations. Her interests in environmental sound include interspecies communication, nocturnal soundscapes and acoustic ecology – the relationship between sound and humans. She was nominated for Ivor Novello Composer Award in 2021 and won of the Leah Reid Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music in 2023. Her work has been played at Quench Gallery, Margate; Kings Place, London; and Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Sonic Territories, Germany; Pitea Performing Arts Biennial, Sweden; Spektra Festival, Columbia; Ecoacoustic Congress, Brisbane; as well as on BBC Radio 3.
Teoniki Rożynek is a composer with a passion for sound design. Attentive listening to reality provides the key source of her sound material. She collects scraps of sound junk and sonic waste to generate her compositions. Her practice includes electronic and electroacoustic music, both as a solo musician and within collectives. She plays the violin, electronics and randomly found objects. She has also collaborated with artists from other art forms to create films, performances and multimedia installations. Her works have been performed at various festivals, including the Warsaw Autumn, Musica Electronica Nova (Wrocław), Sacrum Profanum (Kraków), Unsound (Kraków), Containerclang (Cologne), and the Bedingo International Festival of Exploratory Music (Victoria, Australia).
Una Lee is an artist working with sounds, stories and sensations, in perpetual pursuit of alternative storytelling. She plays with the notion of a contemporary marriage between performance and poetry. She likes to explore human condition, memory, time, and our relationship with art and ecology through narratives. These are often drawn from her autobiographical events as a non-native in her current habitat, while she can be identified as Korean-Irish-British within her practice. She has performed and exhibited extensively including at Sonorities Festival, Belfast; International Summer Music Festival Darmstadt; Nowy Teatr, Warsaw; Espace Niemeyer, Paris; Osaka Electroacoustic Music Festival; Dotolim, Seoul; and apex art, New York. She is an Oram Award winner and Ivor Novello Composers Award nominee, and holds an MA and PhD from Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast.
