Acts of Air: Reshaping the urban sonic

Acts of Air is an online exhibition that invites you to reshape your urban sonic present by enacting 14 sound works directly in urban spaces. Each work proposes a sounding out, a performance, a site specific listening or engagement in the streets, under bridges, by water fountains and extractor fans. They offer a means to explore and interrogate our cities of sound.

While the urban is a seemingly fixed and impermeable place, the urban sonic is in the air, performed and enacted each day as we ride the buses, press the buttons and talk to one another. With these vibrations we can choose to re-voice, re-sound, re-hear and rebuild the urban sonic in new ways.

This online exhibition brings together artists from around the world. While the works are shaped by the sites and locations they were made in, including Porto Alegre, Santiago, Hong Kong, Manchester, Melbourne and Cairo, they can be enacted and activated anywhere around the globe. Through local participation the audience as performer can sound out the artists’ provocations and create new engagements with their own local urban. From global participation we can reveal our shared and different conditions of urbanity – the opportunity to hear new possibilities and togetherness through documentation, participation and trace of these art works.

Artists: Agnes Paz, Anna Lann, Anna Raimondo, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Catherine Clover, Cedric Maridet, Colin Priest, Jacek Smolicki, Julieanna Preston, Kate Brown, Raheel Khan, Vagné, Vitório O. Azevedo and Yara Mekawei.