A Programme Without a Single Centre

The Warsaw edition of Avant Art Festival will begin on 15 September at the Polish Radio Concert Studio. The main programme will run for six days, but it will not be confined to a single institution. Concerts, exhibitions, films and performances will take place in the radio studio, theatres, museums, galleries, clubs and independent spaces. The Warsaw edition will culminate with a concert by Krallice on 11 October.

The festival will open with OSMIUM — a collaborative project by Hildur Guðnadóttir, James Ginzburg, Rully Shabara and Sam Slater. Each of them brings a distinctive approach to composition, electronics, voice and sound. The aim, however, is not to combine these elements into a single recognisable form. OSMIUM remains in constant motion, building tension between voice, electronics and the physicality of sound.

The music programme brings together very different approaches to sound: the extended improvisational form of The Necks, Mopcut featuring MC Dälek, the quartet أحمد [Ahmed] returning to the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and the contemporary electronics of feeo. There will also be performances by Ecko Bazz and STILL, as well as a meeting between ||ALA|MEDA|| and Noums Dembele. Tradition is not treated here as a closed repertoire. It becomes material that can be transformed, dismantled and reassembled.

The Indonesian scene also occupies an important place in the programme. Senyawa will perform as a duo, while Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi will present their individual practices through performance, a workshop, film and an audiovisual project.

The Warsaw edition extends beyond concerts. The exhibition Automotive at Stroboskop Space, activities at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and projects combining music and performance reveal different dimensions of this year’s programme.