Aura Satz

Aura’s practice encompasses film, sound, performance and sculpture. Her work explores a distributed, expanded and shared notion of voice using dialogue as both method and subject matter.

In 2022–24, Aura was awarded an AHRC Fellowship in support of 'Preemptive Listening', an experimental documentary feature film. The world premiere was at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, the UK premiere at Tate Modern, and the European premiere at CPH Dox in Copenhagen, where it won the NEW:VISION award. Her work has been performed, exhibited and screened at Tate Britain; the Hayward Gallery; InterCommunication Centre (Tokyo); Lentos Museum (Linz); IMMA (Dublin); Sydney Biennale (Sydney); High Line Art (New York); Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne); De Appel Art Centre (Amsterdam); Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis); Sharjah Art Foundation; Kadist (San Francisco); Onassis Stegi (Athens) and more. 

Screening:
Preemptive Listening
A film by Aura Satz
89mins, 2024

Keynote: 
Preemptive Listening: When does the Symptom Become the Alarm?

Abstract:
In this keynote presentation, Aura Satz will discuss the themes of the film Preemptive Listening and how they have evolved in relation to current global circumstances.

Steve Goodman

Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) is a musician, writer and artist. He is the author of the book Sonic Warfare: sound, affect and the ecology of fear (MIT Press, 2009) and co-edited the books Unsound: Undead (Urbanomic, 2019), Ø (Flatlines Press, 2021) and Sonic Faction: audio essay as method and medium (Urbanomic Press, 2024). He is founder of the record labels Hyperdub and Flatlines, producer of 5 albums, numerous EPs, remixes and DJ mix compilations. He has produced sound installations for the Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern (2018) and the More than Human exhibition (2019) on artificial intelligence at the Barbican in London among others.

Keynote:
Sonic Warfare

Abstract:
Tones, drones, booms, blasts and decoys - this presentation will provide an update to the 2009 book 'Sonic Warfare: sound, affect and the ecology of fear’ (MIT Press), and will discuss deployments of sound in conflict, the atmosphere of fear they produce, the problems of temporality, ontology, epistemology and politics they pose, and the ways they resonate in the planetary networks our contemporary polycrisis.

Abbas Zahedi

Abbas Zahedi (b. 1984, London, UK) is an artist working at the intersections of sonic and sculptural forms, exploring systems of care, thresholds of experience, and the social architectures of our time. His practice has been described as a form of dissociative realism — moving between intimacy and estrangement, and attuned to forms of meaning that sit beyond the purely material.

A former medic with training in psychiatry, Zahedi holds an MA in Contemporary Photography and Philosophy from Central Saint Martins. Recent awards include the Stanley Picker Fellowship (2024), Artangel: Making Time (2023), Frieze Artist Award (2022), Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award (2021), and the Khadijah Saye Memorial Scholarship (2017). He is Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London, and has taught widely in the UK and internationally.

Artist Talk:
Attunement as Exit: Listening Beyond Immersion in the Ecologies of Grief

Abstract:
Abbas Zahedi (b. 1984, London) is a British–Iranian artist whose work spans sound, sculpture, performance, and social processes. His practice reconfigures galleries into sites for collective attunement, where grief is not treated as a private emotion but as a relational process. In Begin Again at Tate Modern, Zahedi embedded seismic resonators into the former power station’s pipes and convenes monthly support groups, transforming the institution’s industrial architecture into an ecology of mourning and repair for ecological grief.

Zahedi has described this as a way of “hijacking” gallery spaces for grief — a threshold where audiences can witness and be witnessed in conditions of loss. This approach resonates with Irit Rogoff’s reading of his work, which calls for grief to be considered as a social relation, and with Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy of atmospheres and spheres: the invisible conditions in which life and relation unfold. It also responds to critiques of immersion in sound art by proposing instead an acoustic condition of immanence — one that privileges rupture, resonance, and differentiation over enclosure.

A formative influence was Zahedi’s own encounter with a psychiatric diagnosis of complex grief, during which he worked with psychiatrist and analyst Rachel Gibbons as she developed her seminal paper arguing that many forms of mental illness stem from stunted or unprocessed mourning — an insight that continues to shape his practice. His work now stages the gallery as an acoustic container, where infrastructures become resonant thresholds for witnessing and metabolising loss collectively. This trajectory informs his doctoral project Acoustic Agency, which develops a framework for sonic epistemics and atmospheres in art institutions and healthcare settings, treating contemporary sound practices not only as aesthetic material but also as a mode of public service and social care.