#NewMedia #SonicArt

Almaty-based artist Anna Kin’s latest video art project "ღ" presents the state of different ethno-linguistic groups following imperial collapse and political transition. For this artwork, people from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia are asked to recite their alphabets. By doing so, Kin aims to showcase languages that have suffered forced assimilation by their former political regimes. Now, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, these languages are either rejuvenating or fading. "ღ" is an invitation to explore individuality, diversity, and the power of language. The project is a work in progress, and Kin plans to keep extending this video art collection as a lifelong project.

“As an artist who employs language, I’ve come to realize how my relationship with it has shifted. Language is both a weapon and a healer it can be used to enforce agonizing hatred at the state level, or it can poignantly place a therapeutic conversation and a prayer. I see brotes as a form of prayer one that continues through art, holding onto something beyond rational”.

Anna Kin’s project is called “ღ”, which takes its title from the Georgian letter ghan whose form playfully echoes the heart symbol, poignantly places a conversation about anticolonial language politics in dialogue with affect. Her work asks not only what languages sound like, but how they animate our sensuous and emotional experiences of the world, that is, how they articulate our lived attachments to political and social worlds in transition. In her film we see not only a crucial effort to catalog the sonic and gestural worlds of languages in crisis and transition, but an artwork that challenges how we think about our affective and somatic embodiment of language more broadly”. - Leah Feldman, project’s supervisor.

Public Program - Narratives that Listen Back

As part of Anna Kin’s exhibition, Narratives that Listen Back gathers practices that treat sound, speech, and administrative language as material. The program frames listening as a collective method: a way to redistribute meaning, and to test how language is produced through bodies, systems, and situations.

Event 01

Dr. Banu Çiçek Tülü (sound artist, music producer, DJ, researcher) @banusoundd Talk: Queering the Sonic: Language Beyond Words and Body

Berlin-based artist Banu Çiçek Tülü approaches sound as a form of language that exceeds script and representation. In dialogue with Anna Kin’s ღ, the talk considers listening as a shared practice that can shift meaning and open other modes of relation.

Date: 11 September 2025, 19:00 Location: Hotel Continental – Art Space in Exile, Elsenstraße 87, 12435 Berlin Language: English Access: Free entry, no RSVP required

Event 02

Nikolay Karabinovych (artist and independent curator) @karabinovych.today Workshop: Field of the Cloth of Gold: L – Labubu, C – Curtis Yarvin, and a hidden cache in the Job Centre

This meditative workshop examines the “language of systems” bureaucracy, ideology, and their everyday instruments. Working with collage and nonlinear montage, Karabinovych proposes practical ways to loosen language from forms of administration and control.

Date: 13 September 2025, 18:00 Location: Hotel Continental – Art Space in Exile, Elsenstraße 87, 12435 Berlin Language: English Access: Free entry, no RSVP required

Exhibition dates: 9–16 September 2025 Opening hours: Tue–Fri 16:00–18:00; Sat 14:00–18:00

This three-day program brought together workshops, presentations, publisher lectures, book launches, and sound-based formats as part of the MISS READ pre-fair program, activated by the SoC Alumn* network in collaboration with Open Sourcing Love (OSL) and Station of Commons. The event worked with publishing and radio not only as outputs, but as infrastructures for gathering: a sequence of situations where reading, listening, and addressing others become shared practices across distance.

Session led by Zuleykha Ibad, Evgenii Bakhtin and Kas / @yourfriendkas Presence-in-Delay, a session structured around listening and letter-writing. The session opened with poetry by Ayaulym Lenkhan and continued as a collective “healing letter-writing” practice. Participants were invited to write postcards as a thread of connection over distance messages of care and support addressed to the extended SoC Alumn* community, to be sent from Berlin across geographies, time zones, and political borders. In parallel, the collaboration also hosted The Chain of Care, a letter-writing session focused on solidarity practices (including writing to political prisoners), using the postcard as a simple tool for contact, persistence, and responsibility.

Open Sourcing Love Open Sourcing Love is an international crowd-sourced movement and an art collective created by Anna Kin and Aigerim Tumenbay, whose practice is based on the alternative use of social networks for communication and connection. OSL contributed to its first offline publication, WAVES: Radio as Collective Imagination (Journal of Contemporary Audio Practices, Vol. 1), published by Miss Read Berlin (2024), which reflects on radio and audio practices as political forms of collective organisation