The Spell of the Sensuous - Sonic Acts Biennial
Sonic Acts
10 February – 17 March 2024

Looiersgracht 60 is pleased to host The Spell of the Sensuous, the 30th edition of the Sonic Acts Biennial. The collective programme of the 2024 edition of the Sonic Acts Biennial will unfold across several sites and temporalities throughout the city of Amsterdam. Alongside various presentations and programmes at sites such as Paradiso, Muziekgebouw, Garage Noord, Eye Filmmuseum, Zone2Source, Oude Kerk, and Stedelijk Museum, the biennial will present a two-part exhibition between W139 and Looiersgracht 60. The exhibition at Looiersgracht 60 will open on the evening of Friday, February 9, and continue until March 17, 2024.

Sharing a single curatorial concept between the two spaces, the works presented at W139 and Looiersgracht 60 embrace the multiplicity of human experience and interconnectedness between environmental crisis and tensions within the body. Presenting works from Lukas Marxt, Elena Khurtova, Anika Schwarzlose, and others, the exhibition encourages the viewer to tune into the corporeality of otherness and engage with the thresholds of their sensoriality. The works exhibited are born from long-term research projects, often mining the archive to examine expansive timescales and histories.

Included in the exhibition is a specially commissioned work by Lukas Marxt which will be exhibited for the first time. Situated across the ground floor and the basement of the space, ‘The Target’ is a filmic installation consisting of video, sculpture, and archival materials examining the history of the Manhattan Project in the United States - a research and development project for the production of the first nuclear weapons. The film follows the search for a sunken dummy atomic bomb, centering it as the film’s protagonist, and expanding the viewer's awareness of the harsh appropriation and colonization of a landscape for the sake of militaristic expansion.

Also unpacking the larger environmental ramifications of weapons production, Elena Khurtova and Anika Schwarzlose will present their work surrounding a long-term research project into the weapons manufacturing industry at the Hembrugterrein. This area just beyond the city limits of Amsterdam, has seen a dramatic shift in focus; from the epicenter of weapons production in The Netherlands in the late 19th century to a residential area and cultural center in the past decade. The work of Khurtova and Schwarzlose is particularly interested in the ‘rehabilitation’ of contaminated space and the renewal of violent soils. The work on display includes a 4-channel film installation, extensive archival materials, and an immersive textile installation. Working with processes such as soil chromatography and 19th-century spirit photography, the textile installation exposes the substances latent in the soil creating spectral portraits of a complex landscape.

The escalating climate crisis and art’s relationship and responsibility to it have been a key concern for Sonic Acts over the past decade. Each edition since has asked how art can respond to, and intervene in, the artificially constructed divisions between nature and culture that have fueled our extractive economies and where are the limits of artistic practices in these conversations. Sonic Acts Biennial 2024: The Spell of the Sensuous, takes its name from David Abram’s eponymous book. Known today for establishing the term ‘more-than-human’, Abram was one of the first academic ecological thinkers to acknowledge animism as a worldview, drawing attention to cosmologies and traditions that already understood the natural world as imbued with consciousness. In both the book and the exhibition, ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’, the body is indeed more than human and non-singular. In thinking through our interconnectedness with the environment, the exhibition questions how examining embodiment can also examine the limits of our own history. As a nod to Abram, the exhibition rethinks ‘rationality’ and explores other sense methodologies to open up further potentials of connectivity.

The opening takes place on Friday 9 Febraury from 19:00- 22:00. Please send an RSVP to info@looiersgracht60.org if you would like to attend.

The exhibition between W139 and Looiersgracht 60 is interwoven with a public programme of workshops, walks, film screenings, and conversations. Tickets and more information about the Sonic Acts Biennal can be found here.