THE LISTENING BIENNIAL is an artistic, creative research platform focusing on listening as a critical practice. This includes highlighting listening as crucial for conflict resolution, learning, caregiving, and interpersonal relations, as well as nurturing ecological sensitivity and how we may relate to the more-than-human. It is our belief that listening is vitally important for attending to situations of crisis, not to mention contributing to the joy of life, and underpins the promise of democracy as a project of social justice and human flourishing.
Through The Listening Biennial, listening is creatively and critically explored. This takes shape through curating a biennial exhibition consisting of commissioned audio works by artists from around the world, along with related public programs, and through fostering a transnational global network of partner institutions. It is the intention of the Biennial to operate through a cooperative, decentered structure: the Biennial is not situated in a single city, nor is it aligned with one particular institution. Rather, it articulates a unique form of institutionality, one guided by listening as an organizational method.
Each edition of the Biennial is curated by a team of curators based in different parts of the world and who commission works by artists from their regions. Furthermore, each edition is presented simultaneously on-site across a global network of partner institutions and venues, where each presentation is facilitated by a local curatorial partner who is encouraged to present the Biennial in a way that relates to their given contexts and communities. This includes exploring different formats, including gallery installations, listening stations, performance events, listening sessions, soundwalks and radio transmissions.
The Biennial invites audiences and publics into diverse listening experiences with the idea of enriching personal lives while also opening paths for enhancing listening cultures.
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Third Edition, August 21 – October 26, 2025
Curated by:
Soledad Garcia Saavedra, Alecia Neo and Suvani Suri
We’re currently preparing for the next edition of the Biennial to take place in 2025, which will include 27 participating artists. The concept of Third Listening is being developed as an overarching theme, and is envisioned as a generative framework for discussions and practices. Third Listening is a listening that opens a time and space for intersubjective partnership and witnessing; it is about mutual recognition and trust, and how we may take responsibility for a shared world. This includes acknowledging individual histories and cultural viewpoints, as well as the need to listen out for the unheard and unspoken. It is equally important to give room to silence, to the rhythms of the body, to forms of self-care, which are granted support through listening. The circulation of diverse life stories and multiple ways of knowing are part of Third Listening as well, suggesting a shift from a language of mastery to that of generosity, from independence to interdependent responsiveness.
Central to this is the interest to explore a variety of questions in collaboration with others, such as: What does listening mean to different communities? How does listening translate across cultures, and is there a language of listening to learn? How is listening put under strain by contemporary attention economies? And how might listening intervene within current polarizations across social, political worlds?
We invite partnerships and collaborations with a variety of institutions, organizations and collectives, and look forward to cooperating on presenting the Biennial in 2025.
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What leads us to listening? And how does listening lead us? Where does it take us, and what does it enable? It is our interest to stay close to listening, and to stay close to the ways in which listening brings one within a process of discovery, negotiation, sensitivity, sharing, transformation. Listening prompts a critical and creative curiosity, a receptiveness and responsiveness, to what one may hear or encounter, see and feel, and also what such listening may give way to, from knowing and meaningful exchange, lazy thoughts and critical attention, to social debate and poetic imagination.
If listening takes us somewhere it is into the ebbing and flowing of life, the deep pulse and resonant reach of becoming-with; it is toward intimacies and a world of touch, as well as to the edges of the familiar, what is unidentifiable yet no less present, from the invisible to the less-than-linguistic, the untold and the not-yet. Listening is so fragile, so tenuous and yet so powerful; it extends and stretches, it leaves one open and it opens space for others, from friends to strangers, the earthly to the cosmic. Listening can be beautiful, and it can be painful as well, whether in relation to the noises of the world, those voices and words that may hurt, that aim at hurting, or by way of the unlistenable cries of others, where listening is strained, made unbearable, or where we may miss hearing what we so long to hear. Listening invades and it may control – it is clearly part of a greater set of techniques for monitoring the borders of states and communities, as well as what helps create a safe space for lonely feelings, for being alone, and with each other.
Listening takes us in all these different directions, and in this way it becomes important to reflect upon where one places one’s listening, and how one’s listening is placed; what am I hearing around me, and what is left unsaid, unheard? Am I heard, and in what ways? Is listening given the time and space needed for its patient work? Can I refuse to be listened to, and does my listening also demand more than others can give? The sensorial politics shaping the flows of attention is deeply at play when it comes to listening, requiring a greater engagement with what listening may mean or do, and how it may question itself at times.on presenting the Biennial in 2025.
Following such complexity and curiosity, the Listening Biennial opens up to thinking further about listening and how we may come to foster its political and poetic potential, its material and imaginative shaping of things. To do so, the Biennial is concerned to create experiences of listening as defined by an international group of participating artists whose works confront us with a complex range of sonic experiences and performative expressions; through their works we encounter strategies and methods, questions and answers, localities and worlds, all of which speak toward ways of listening that are equally ways of thinking and living-with, where listening is never only about sound or the normative ear. Rather, it is made radically attentional, exuberant, tenacious and tender, inciting wayward paths and critical echoes in and around being-human.
Listening is put forward as what enables both localized, intimate, and communal relationships as well as global and planetary views, where listening may sense beyond the apparent and the legible. As Anna Tsing poignantly suggests, listening wields a power by which to attend and align with greater ecological systems of life and their polyphonies.
In pursuing a transversal and polyphonic approach, the Biennial is further based on bringing together a constellation of collaborating organizations, spaces, and collectives as active partners, each of which has been invited to create and present their own version of the Biennial. Sharing the works by participating artists, each partner responds by situating them within their own environments, and in relation to the communities or audiences they serve, often nesting the Biennial within a diverse and dynamic range of existing settings, festivals, institutions and scenes.
Through such an approach, the Biennial adopts a listening attitude, creating opportunities and openings for others to join, to present and perform, to jam together, to craft localized expressions that also contribute to a greater network of exchange – a construct of rhythms and resonances passing across and between different worlds. In this sense, the Biennial poses an idea of “acoustic care,” where attention may be given not only to the listening one may individually enact, but also to facilitating the particular conditions in support of the listening others may do, or that we may do together. Acoustic care cares for the timings and spacings, the social arrangements and bodily gestures, the systems or structures needed to support a sensitivity for listening, and a sense for what listening may enable or do; an acoustic care that is not only bound to the audible, and the sounded, but equally concerns itself with a greater ecology of attention. From the vibrational commoning key to being-together, and becoming-with, to the reverberant circulation of views and viewpoints, to the noisy intensities of creaturely and multi-species life, acoustic care emerges as a craft, a doing, a civility, a tactic and, in our case, an invitation. It is less a performative approach, and more conductive, in terms of keeping our listening going, and keeping the (bio)diversity of our social adventure going as well.
It is these ideas and concerns that underpin The Listening Biennial, and which we offer as a proposition, a care-work, and a gesture of love. For listening is certainly there, as part of the passionate and persistent stories we may create together.
– Brandon LaBelle, June 2021
