My body is comfortably nested in a velvet seat in the main hall of the Muziekgebouw. On stage, Saint Abdullah—brothers Mohammad and Mehdi—accompanied by Eomac and Rebecca Salvadori, perform during the first evening of Expanded Experience, a series within Sonic Acts Biennial centered on audiovisual formats. Their performance, A Forbidden Distance, layers a video diary of Mohammad's family's migratory life in Canada against a backdrop of electronic bass, beats, and spoken fragments. The images are tender—a family rebuilding its nest in the west while maintaining its Iranian roots. These images and the lives they depict coexist with the lingering presence of genocide, Islamophobia, and the incipient collapse of humanity as mediated through screens and feeds. As we watch one family’s story of displacement and renewal play out, a voice comes through the speakers: "We don't seem to be scared enough by the violence that surrounds us." The words reach us in our plush seats in the privileged pavilions of a waning empire, contemplating an artwork about the material effects of geopolitics and violence.
This is the kind of affective dissonance that defines this edition of the Sonic Acts Biennial, titled “Melted for Love” in homage to the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: the looming presence of systemic violence coexisting with inextinguishable tenderness. Running for roughly two months, with an intensive festival weekend from 26 February to 1 March, the Biennial is programmed by Gideon Kiers, Mirna Belina, Maud Seuntjens, Angeliki Tzortzakaki, Hannah Pezzack, and Giulia Nicolai, working with Director Lucas van der Velden. Expressed primarily in time-based forms, e.g., sonic experimentation, moving image, performance, the program listens through the rumble of expanding warfare for the sound of home. Home is not always a physical space, nor is it always a safe one—it manifests as a set of relationships that must be actively reclaimed when it is forcibly threatened. As the festival unfolds, increasing numbers of people are becoming homeless on their own lands because of war, colonialization, precariousness, and climate catastrophe.
Saint Abdullah, Eomac (Ian McDonnell), and Rebecca Salvadori performing during ‘Expanded Experience’ at Muziekgebouw, 26 February 2026. Photo by Angelina Nikolayeva.
In this climate, calls for the formation of communities of understanding are particularly urgent, and not only metaphorically, but practically. The three-venue exhibition, spanning W139, Rozenstraat, and Arti et Amicitiae, builds on this imperative by forming alliances across Amsterdam's most long-standing independent spaces, each with its own distinct history of collective organizing. This is itself a political gesture: the city's art scene is built not only through vertical institutional hierarchies but also through grassroots solidarity — and the Biennial makes that visible. This logic is evident in the curation and in the daily guided tours offered to audiences, a gesture of care and a statement about how the Biennial positions itself as a community-building endeavor. The works on show find their way toward each other through historical resonances that endure erasure, loss, and grief. But despite the pain, they form bridges across the realms of the living and of the dead, with an insistence that is poetry itself. Poetry glides through the works as an affective force, offering multiple entry points, establishing dialogues to be felt rather than decoded.
At W139, before I can orient myself, sound finds me first. Two wooden, totemic resonance structures fill the entrance with rustling—a quiet insistence that something is still alive inside the architecture of empire. Lower Levant Company (LLC) in collaboration with Olga Micińska, investigate Cyprus's geopolitical entanglements across the Levant, tracing how the historical Levant Company—an early capitalist trade network linking the British, Venetians, and Ottomans—continues to organize power and capital in the region today. The installation Bad Luck to Every Magistrate, and Bad Luck to Every Gamekeeper reclaims Cyprus's forced role as the “antenna island” of empires by turning to bat colonies as collaborators. Chiropteran sonar guides the inhabitants of a post-collapse future in which the RAF bases at Akrotiri and Dhekelia have been dismantled. Between the frequencies of the empire and the rustling of endemic populations of bats, I begin to feel how the Biennial's bridges are to be made—not through argument, but through connections that otherwise have been severed by infrastructural colonialism and war.
Comprehensive Exhibition Tour, 27 February. Photo by Angelina Nikolayeva.
At Arti et Amicitiae, I lock eyes with the protagonist of Noor Abed's video installation A Night We Held Between. I am held in her orbit. The video follows a warrior who moves through the landscape of Palestine—caves, underground passages, wild valleys—in a dance that is at once militant and tender and which reactivates a legacy of resistance profoundly entangled with the land. The film is built around a 1990 recording of an elderly woman singing in her home to welcome the Resistance. The audio is archived in the Popular Art Center in Ramallah. Where are you from, warrior? We adorn a braid beneath your hat, sings the woman, with a voice that does not merely document history, but inhabits it. Abed builds her film around this inhabitation: the warrior moves because the song has already moved. After all, resistance is not an event but a continuous bodily practice passed down generations through exactly this kind of ordinary transmission. I think about what it means to receive such a transmission here, in this room, at this time.
Noor Abed, A Night We Held Between, film still, 2024. Photo by Pieter Kers
Christian Nyampeta's and Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Whispers at Rozenstraat opens at a different time. Drawing on Birago Diop's poem “Spirits” and the time the artist spent in Dakar following the postponement of the Dak'Art Biennial in 2024, the work invites its audience to listen carefully: to pay attention to things as a way of honoring the aliveness of life itself. The work asks at what point an ancestor escapes their specific descendants to become the ancestor of all. This question is less about loss than about the past's embeddedness in the present. Installed in a dedicated room at Rozenstraat, the moving images play out as an ode to the ordinary person through whom, unevenly but consistently, something like divinity manifests. A faith in spirituality that the West has largely discarded, replacing it with the ostensible rational organization of belief and knowledge.
Flavia Dzodan’s lecture during the Symposium at the Stedelijk Museum, February 28. Photo by Angelina Nikolayeva.
All of the works described above refuse the idea that colonialism's amputations are final, that occupation's silences endure. They propose a listening practice so attentive that it becomes a form of resilience. The severed connections, the material violence, the ancestral time, must be met with love. Not love as sentiment, but love as a political practice, something built and maintained against the current. This is the point of awareness at which Flavia Dzodan's contribution during the Biennial’s discursive program at the Stedelijk Museum proves essential and incisive. In her ongoing project Affective Logistics, she diagnoses how computational infrastructure—routed through military command systems, Taylorist efficiency models, and optimized UX design—captures, standardizes, and monetizes feeling, positing algorithmic intimacy as the affective compass we use to negotiate society rather than embracing the friction of genuine relationships. Love has not been hidden from us—it has been neutralized, repurposed as a mechanism of control that severs our relationships with each other and with the world. To love politically, then, is not a given—it is an act of recovery that must be consciously maintained precisely because the infrastructure of contemporary life is designed to dim its force before it can become transformational.
During the festival weekend, news of US and Israeli strikes on Iran leaked into the room, with Iranian retaliation strikes rippling across the states of the Persian Gulf. The unfolding imperialist catastrophe entered the program and was absorbed. People filed in and out of talks. The institution held its shape; it didn’t melt under violence, maybe because of the affective entanglements orchestrated by the exhibition. But the news magnified a question I carry: does art, in a historical moment like ours, become a way of sorting feeling—sharpening it, turning it toward action—or does it function as a filter, mediating the unbearable into the bearable, making us more capable of living alongside violence rather than more compelled to end it? The question bites harder when you consider where it comes from. At the core of Europe, we are cushioned, permitted to feel our feelings, to process grief through aesthetics, to leave at the end of the show, and to go home. Such privilege is not extended to those for whom mourning is itself a surveilled political act, whose funerals are bombarded, nor is it for those for whom violence is not something visited via spectacle but something lived inside, with no exit.
I was, of course, among those who could leave. After departing the venues, grateful for the abundance of practices and generosity of dissemination, I found myself wanting to bend low and put my ear to the ground, to listen to the earth crying, to feel what that attention means: encompassing revolutionary love, when one is sheltered from the very violence that makes it necessary. We admitted we were human beings, and melted for love in this desert. Whether this admission transforms us into warriors—outside the institution, in the world that absorbs catastrophe so cleanly—is still, and always, the question we must listen to and hardest to hear.
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Cover: Kivu Ruhorahoza and Christian Nyampeta, Whispers, 2025, video still. Courtesy of Seoul Mediacity Biennale.
