Sonics & Scenics
Public Programme, 26-29 June

Thursday 26 June, 18:00–21:15 | Sonic Toasts

A celebration of the launch of the festival with a special preview of the very first film in the commissioned series Pamięć oddechu / Breath Memory by Mairéad McClean, drawing on the silent footage from the Polish Archive of Home Films, followed by live music performances by Antonina Nowacka, with an ensemble, and Barbara Kinga Majewska.

18:00–18:45,  Auditorium: Welcome to Sonics & Scenics, followed by a toast at the Bar

19:00–19:15,  Cinema: special preview of a new film Wesele / A Wedding by Mairéad McClean, commissioned for the festival

19:30–20:00, Cinema: live music performance Sylphine Soporifera by Antonina Nowacka (voice and zither), with Anna Pašić (flute), Magdalena Gajdzica (harp), accompanied by visuals by Weronika Izdebska

20:15– 21:15, Cinema: special preview of an audio-visual essay Organa Organicum by Barbara Kinga Majewska, Michał Libera and Łukasz Sosiński, followed by a live music performance by Barbara Kinga Majewska (voice)

Friday 27 June, 17:00–22:00 | Sonic Universes: bees, birds, ghosts 

17:00–18:00, Auditorium
Kitchen Conversation #1

Historian and theorist of sound, Gascia Ouzounian, invites sound artist Nikki Sheth and artist, filmmaker and cultural activist Andrea Luka Zimmerman into a conversation on how we experience the human and more-than-human world through sound, and how sonic universes in sound installations and in films are woven together. The spark for this session is Nikki’s new 8-channel installation, commissioned for the festival, composed of nocturnal sounds recorded in and around the iconic summer house of the architects Oskar and Zofia Hansen in Szumin.

18:30–20:30, Cinema
Film screening of Wayfaring Stranger (2024, 70 min) by Andrea Luka Zimmerman plus Q&A.

A screening of London-based filmmaker, artist and cultural activist Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s latest feature-length film – charting the life of an itinerant character, embodied by seven performers, across seven days, representing seven decades – followed by a Q&A lead by the MSN curator Sebastian Cichocki.

Wayfaring Stranger, filmed in landscapes marked by centuries of ceaseless, often destructive, human interaction, asks what it takes to find a liveable life on one’s own terms and without conflict with others and the environment. With text written and performed by acclaimed writer and poet Eileen Myles and sound design by multi-award-winning sound recordist Chris Watson. The film premiered at the IFF Rotterdam in 2024.

21:00–22:00, Cinema
Live listening session with sound artist, curator and DJ Karolina Kobielusz (aka Hermeneia)

In this listening session, Karolina Kobielusz brings together field recordings from Szumin – the Hansens’ House, Open Form interactive visual games in the garden, the orchard, the river Bug’s oxbow lakes – pressed on vinyl in the form of sound postcards. The session also features an original noise box instrument, inspired by the architects Oskar and Zofia Hansen’s Open Form concept, contemporary experimental music, as well as Wingie MKII resonator allowing the artist to interact with the environment and enrich its sound in real time.

Saturday 28 June, 14:00–22:00 |  Sonic Pictures: realities/fictions

14:00–15:00, Auditorium
Kitchen Conversation #2

Historian and theorist of sound, Gascia Ouzounian, invites sound designers Chu-Li Shewring and Katarzyna Szczerba into a conversation on the ways in which film frames and places are transformed through soundscapes that can bring them to life and merge with them in a symbiotic relationship evoking realities and/or elaborating fictions. The starting  point to this conversation is Chu-Li Shewring’s new installation Termites Speaking in Tongues, commissioned for the festival, making the Museum’s Cinema Tower resonate with a human and insect chorus.

15:30–16:30, Cinema
Screening of films by Chu-Li Shewring & Adam Gutch, with intro

A screening of two films by Chu-Li Shewring & Adam Gutch: Working to Beat the Devil, 2014, 24 min; and  Fawley, 2022, 25 min.

Working to Beat the Devil features an aging scientist troubled and confused by remembrances from his past, who toils night and day to (re)discover secrets to the creation of life. Conjuring up Shelley’s Frankenstein, the natural history films of Jean Painlevé, and speaking in the words of Darwin, the film instils a quiet yet powerful sense of wonder in rediscovering the wild shapes of nature. Working to Beat the Devil was nominated for Tiger Awards for Short Films at 2014 IFF Rotterdam.

Weaving a multitude of voices, both human and non-human, Fawley explores the environs of the now demolished Fawley Power Station, a huge Brutalist structure that was built on the edge of the New Forest, UK, between 1964 and 1971. The first of its kind – oil fuelled and computer-controlled – it became a strange, brooding and controversial presence within an area of outstanding natural beauty. Fawley won Best International Short Film at Sheffield Doc-Fest in 2022.

17:00–18:00, Cinema
Screening of films with sound design by Katarzyna Szczerba, with intro

A screening of three short films with sound design by sound recordist and sound designer Katarzyna Szczerba: Object: Diving Below the Ice, dir. Paulina Skibińska, 2015, 15 min; Para w pokoju / Couple in a room smoking cigarettes, dir. Katarzyna Gondek, 2019, 11 min; and Wildtracks dir. Andrzej Załęski, featuring acclaimed nature sound recordists Chris Watson and  Izabela Dłużyk, 2025, 35min.

The film Object: Diving Below the Ice follows a diver exploring the frigid depths below the ice. The director, Paulina Skibińska, aimed to create a mesmerizing and immersive experience, allowing the audience to descend into the depths with the diver, where the world above the water disappears. Szczerba’s sound design plays a crucial role in enhancing this immersive experience, capturing the disorientation and tension of the dive. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 and won the Cinesonika Best Soundtrack Award in 2016.

Para w pokoju / Couple in a room smoking cigarettes invites the audience into the home of an elderly couple, Jadzia and Wiesio, as they go about their daily lives punctuated by smoking. As they eat eggs, smoke, cook sausages, smoke, share each other’s company and smoke some more, Gondek’s lens captures their relationship with startling yet warm and somewhat endearing authenticity.

Wildtracks documents the creation of a collaborative audio piece titled Białowieża by nature sound recordists Chris Watson and Izabela Dłużyk. Chris Watson, one of the world’s most acclaimed recordists, is known for his work with the BBC and David Attenborough. Izabela Dłużyk, sightless from birth, is known for her recordings made in Białowieża Forest, Europe’s last primaeval forest. Together, Chris and Izabela recorded in the forest in spring 2024 to create a new work, which is a sonic document of not only one of Poland’s most beautiful regions, but also, in recent years, the site of migrants’ deaths along the border between Belarus and the EU.

19:00–20:30, Cinema
Screening of  Preemptive Listening by Aura Satz, 2024, 89 min.

Aura Satz’s documentary is the latest iteration of the artist’s ongoing project on sirens. Filming in locations as varied as the Fukushima nuclear site in Japan and alert-system assembly lines in the US, Satz considers the siren as a cipher for contemporary ideas of emergency and preparedness. Preemptive Listening features original compositions from over twenty experimental musicians, including Elaine Mitchener, Laurie Spiegel, Sarah Davachi, Moor Mother, Raven Chacon, and Camille Norment.

21:00–22:00, Cinema: live music performance of po (e) sies  by Una Lee with vocalists from the Sirens Chamber Choir conducted by Magdalena Gruziel

po (e) sies, 2024, 40 min, is a performance work on migration across time and space, with bilingual poetry (Korean & English), preserving a flower-garden as music inscribed in the air. The piece was nominated for the prestigious Ivor Novello Composers Award in 2024.

Reincarnating the Korean ancient poetry/song form of Hyangga (meaning ‘home song’), po (e) sies questions ways to maintain a garden as an heirloom, and how poetry can migrate across time and space. The work takes the blossoming calendar from a faraway garden as a musical score, telling the story of an elderly woman who sings to her flowers in her garden about the ephemerality of everything and human desire to be remembered. Originally developed with the Landless ensemble, the piece has been reimagined for the festival with the singers from the Warsaw-based Sirens Chamber Choir.

Sunday 29 June, 14:00–22:00 | Sonic Memories: a knock, a boom, a song

14:00 – 15:00, Auditorium: Kitchen Conversation #3

Historian and theorist of sound, Gascia Ouzounian, invites musician and composer Barbara Kinga Majewska and artist working with sounds, stories and sensations Una Lee into a conversation on the ways remembered songs, sounds and stories infuse how we navigate spaces, buildings, cities. The starting points to this conversation are two new sound commissions for the Museum’s audio guide created by Barbara and Una, taking audiences on sonic journeys across concrete and imaginary staircases and passageways.

15:30 – 16:30, Cinema

Auxculto. Listening session by Audiosphere Studio, led by Daniel Koniusz and Jakub Żwirełło

Auxculto is an initiative of students at the Audiosphere Studio at University of the Arts Poznań who shared a need for a deep, collective experience of music. The original collective was formed by Klaudia Jeleńska, Dawid Dzwonkowski and Jakub Żwirełło. Auxculto events are based on listening together to entire albums and other musical works and projects, under conditions fostering maximum focus and immersion in the sound. Their practice was inspired by the audiophile tradition, and by the concept of “deep listening,” which stresses conscious, careful attunement to sounds, while minimising visual stimuli.

At this session of Auxculto, we will listen together to the album Aguirre by the German group Popol Vuh. This was the group’s seventh album, but also served as the soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s 1972 film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The album, released in 1975, contains works used in the film as well as compositions from 1972–1974, including alternate versions of works from the group’s earlier records.

17:00 –18:30, Cinema
Screening of films by Mairéad McClean, plus Q&A

A screening of three films by Bath-based Irish artist and filmmaker Mairéad McClean: No More, 2013, 16 min; Making Her Mark, 2018, 11 min; and Acts of Memory, 2024, 28 min, 16mm.

Set against the backdrop of Northern Ireland’s turbulent history in the 1970s, No More addresses the subject of internment without trial. While one man enforces imprisonment, elsewhere in Europe another explores freedom through body and breath. No More incorporates footage from a 1972 Jerzy Grotowski Polish Laboratory Theatre training film, showing lead actor Ryszard Cieślak performing body exercises derived from hatha yoga – designed to push the practitioner beyond their own limitations. No More won the inaugural MAC International Ulster Bank Art Prize in 2014.

In Making Her Mark, Scottish dance artist Tess Letham performs a seemingly absurd task: attempting to draw a borderline directly onto the landscape using an oversized pencil. Her physical struggle and the futility of the gesture underscore the often arbitrary nature of boundaries and the limits of control. Filmed across land, sea and air in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, Making Her Mark stages the human body in tension with the vastness of nature.

Acts of Memory revisits cinematic and national history through the story of the Public Record Office in Dublin, Ireland – an archive lost to war and its virtual reconstruction a century later. Shot on 16mm film, it imagines exchanges between a member of staff from the Record Office and a researcher. Narrated by an AI-generated voice synthesised from millions of speech recordings, the film reflects on the process of filmmaking while questioning its own role and authority.

19:00– 20:30, Cinema: screening of films by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind

A screening of three films by London-based Palestinian-Danish artist Larissa Sansour and London-based Danish author, director and artist Søren Lind: In Vitro, 2019, 28 min; As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night, 2022, 21 min; and Familiar Phantoms, 2023, 42 min.

Commissioned by the Danish Arts Foundation for the 58th Venice Biennale, In Vitro is a 2-channel Arabic-language sci-fi film set within an abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem converted into an enormous orchard in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists prepare to replant the soil above.

As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night is a three-channel work featuring an Arabic-language opera on loss, mourning and inherited trauma. A single aria, a new composition by Lebanese composer Anthony Sahyoun, based on Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and the Palestinian traditional song Mashaal, is performed by Palestinian soprano Nour Darwish.

Familiar Phantoms is an experimental documentary short film about memory, history and trauma. Blending live action, special effects, private family photos and archival footage, the film explores the impact of fiction on the creation and reinterpretation of memory. Familiar Phantoms is inspired by anecdotes from Larissa Sansour’s family history and her old childhood in Bethlehem, making it her most personal film to date.

21:00 – 22:00, Cinema: live electronic music performance by Teoniki Rożynek with generative visuals by Martyna Chojnacka

An invitation to a rich and adventurous audiovisual journey with electronic music by composer with passion for sound design and sonic waste Teoniki Rożynek and generative visuals by programmer Martyna Chojnacka, a duo that has been working together for many years.