Sonics & Scenics
Festival of sound arts and artist film

Over this year’s summer months the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw resonates with sonic landscapes, songs, incantations, stories, echoes, acoustic shadows and conversations during a festival of sound arts and artist film focusing on the invisible waves shaping the experience of places and underpinning the image-centred culture in which we live. The programme curated and produced collaboratively by The Wapping Project, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, brings together interventions, installations, performances, screenings and discussions, including a series of newly commissioned works in sound arts by artists working in Poland and the UK, 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. And Chu-Li Shewring infests the Cinema Tower with screeching and buzzing of a chorus of human and insect voices humming in harmony and dissonance. 

Mairéad McClean’s new films, presented as simultaneously contemporary and historical ‘newsreels’ before cinema screenings throughout the summer,  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. Working with the silent 8 and 16mm reels, McClean asks what memory sounds like. Rather than reconstruct reality of the intimate moments held within the deteriorated and scratched celluloid, she evokes ghost traces of breath, murmur, vibration of people being together within the film frame. 

The new sound and film commissions launch during a four-day public programme – from 26 to 29 June – alongside screenings, live performances and discussions. Within the auditorium, Gascia Ouzounian, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, hosts a series of Kitchen Conversations with sound artists, offering an insight into the creative processes behind the making of the new works. Within the cinema, artists, filmmakers and sound designers, including Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Mairéad McClean, Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind, Chu-Li Shewring & Adam Gutch, and Katarzyna Szczerba share their recent films. Each evening of the public programme concludes with a live music performance, including the inaugural Thursday celebration presented in collaboration with Ephemera Festival. The line up includes Antonina Nowacka with an ensemble, Barbara Kinga Majewska, Karolina Kobielusz (aka Hermeneia), Teoniki Rożynek with Martyna Chojnacka, and Una Lee together with a group of singers from the Warsaw-based Sirens Chamber Choir. The final days of Sonics & Scenics – 20-21 September – will see the launch of a new music album by Teoniki Rożynek, commissioned for the festival, a live performance by Aleksandra Słyż, and a performative lecture by Jennifer Walshe.  

The festival, presented by The Wapping Project, London, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN Warsaw), forms part of the UK/Poland Season 2025 and is supported by the British Council. 

About The Wapping Project

The Wapping Project is a platform for the continuous development of ideas and people, set up by Women’s Playhouse Trust (WPT), a charity registered in England in 1981. Established to support those whose voices and stories need to be heard and seen, mostly women, often those whose life and/or career paths have not been straightforward, and above all those who believe in synergy, in making something larger than one could make on their own. Over the years, both WPT and The Wapping Project supported careers of many writers, choreographers, composers, visual artists, filmmakers and photographers. Currently, The Wapping Project is a nomadic organisation, defined by its core principles of idiosyncrasy, ambition, experimentation and collaboration.

Recent projects include: a feature-length artist film WAYFARING STRANGER by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, which premiered at IFF Rotterdam in 2024; a feature artist documentary THE ETERNAL NIGHT by Coco Fusco, co-commissioned in partnership with Sharjah Art Foundation for Sharjah Biennial 15, 2023; an artist film MAKING HER MARK by Mairéad McClean, acquired by the Arts Council of Ireland for its permanent collection in 2022; a programme of production residencies and commissions RESONANCE, including Resonance Finland 2023, supported by Kone Foundation; and a music album THE EARTH WITH HER CROWNS by Laura Cannell, 2020.