Frequencies
February 28 – June 29, 2025
Great Hall & East Wing Galleries
Frequencies is an exhibition featuring a group of contemporary artists who explore the dynamic possibilities of sound. These artists attend to the audible and inaudible traces of the world to create works across sculpture, architecture, video, performance, and image.
Artworks on view foreground the physical, material, embodied, and affective dimensions of sound to amplify hidden histories and imagine possible futures. Some works are attuned to the built and natural environment, while others explore the resonant possibilities of materials like ceramic vessels, modified instruments, and aluminum tapestries. Together, these works invite us to experience sound expansively, beyond what is audible: listening through the body, material, movement, and sensation.
Artists included are Alluvium, Vivian Caccuri, Sofía Córodva, Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez, Nikita Gale, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Sara Ouhaddou, Adrian Piper, Ana Paula Santana, Naama Tsabar, and Karima Walker.
Frequencies also features Channeling the Ear, a dedicated space for intimate listening experiences featuring a selection of albums by artists and musicians such as AGF (Antye Greie-Ripatti), Maryanne Amacher, Jessica Ekomane, Christine Sun Kim, Katalin Ladik, Lime Rickey International (Leyya Mona Tawil), Audra Wolowiec, and selections from the collection of Nothing to Commit Records, a research and publishing platform founded by guest curator Bhavisha Panchia.
Frequencies is organized by Guest Curator Bhavisha Panchia and MOCA Tucson Curator Alexis Wilkinson.
This exhibition was initiated in collaboration with Julio César Morales. Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Teiger Foundation; Kasmin, New York; PALMA; A Gentil Carioca; Arizona Commission on the Arts; and MOCA Tucson’s Board of Trustees, Ambassador Council, and Members. Program collaborators are Desert Drone and Tea House: Sine & Symbol, an intermedia arts festival; KXCI Community Radio; Tucson Noise Symposium; and Wave Archive.
In-kind support provided by Brick Box Brewery, BRINK Media, Danny Vinik & Mary Ann Brazil, MODERN ANCIENT, The Downtown Clifton, and the University of Arizona School of Art.
About the Artists
Alluvium, a collaborative project of Nika Kaiser and Nathan Stickel, uses a combination of composed and improvised video projection, field recordings, and experimental sound. They create performative installations responding to site-specific details within each of their works, drawing ties between the political and the spiritual. Nika Kaiser works with photography, video, sound and installation. Her art practice deploys a meeting of the imaginary and the real to explore ideas of deep time, interspecies connection, anti-capitalism, and future ecologies and is informed by her upbringing in the Sonoran borderlands. Kaiser holds an MFA in Visual Art from the University of Oregon. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she has been the recipient of two Arts Foundation New Works Grants, a Warhol Foundation Grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. She teaches experimental practices in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Arizona. Nathan Stickel is an interdisciplinary creator whose work meets at the intersection of sound and politics. He has contributed to a variety of communal and experimental projects, in the forms of coordination and curation, writing, projection, and music. In addition to Alluvium, he has performed as a member of the hardcore/punk bands Mala Mente and Destruido, touring throughout the US. Nathan is currently a member of the BCC, an experimental hub for communal life in Tucson, Arizona.
Vivian Caccuri is an artist based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For the past fifteen years, Caccuri has been developing installations, performances, drawings, and embroideries that investigate how sound can disorient everyday experiences, inspire new forms of living and modulate power dynamics in society. Caccuri’s artistic practice seeks to highlight the active yet under-recognized aspects of sound. Vivian has participated in shows such as the 32nd and 33rd São Paulo Biennial, the Venice Biennale and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India, and has exhibited works at the New Museum and High Line Art in New York City, Museo JUMEX in Mexico among others.
Sofía Córdova lives and works between her native Puerto Rico and Oakland, CA. Her work considers sci-fi as alternative history, dance music’s liberatory dimensions, climate change and migration, and most recently, revolution—historical and imagined—within the matrix of class, gender, race, late capitalism and its evolving technologies. She works in performance, video, sound, music, installation, photography, and sometimes taxidermy. She is one half of the music duo, XUXA SANTAMARIA. In addition to discrete projects, they collectively score all of her video work. Córdova’s work has been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Tufts University Galleries, the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, SFMOMA, the Arizona State University Museum, the Vincent Price Museum, the Wattis Institute, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (USA), as well as the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (Puerto Rico), Art Hub (Shanghai) and MEWO Kunsthalle (Germany). The same is part of The Kadist’s and The Whitney Museum’s permanent collections. She has participated in residencies at Eyebeam, NY, Headlands Center for the Arts, Mills College Museum, CA, and the ASU Museum, AZ and composed and choreographed performances for the SF Arts Commission, Merce Cunningham Trust and Soundwave Biennial. She is a recipient of a Fundación Ama Amoedo Grant, a Creative Work Fund Grant and is a 2023 Artadia Awardee.
Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez grew up in Medellín, Colombia; Rotterdam, The Netherlands; and the Ruhr area, Germany. She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she was a master student under Rosemarie Trockel, and earned her Master of Fine Arts in 2005 from the Royal College of Art in London. Her work has been exhibited internationally at renowned institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Shedhalle, Zurich; Triangle France, Marseille; and the Barbican, London. Her works are represented in numerous private and public collections worldwide. She has received multiple awards and grants throughout her career, most recently the grant for artistic research from Kunstfonds Bonn in 2024.
Nikita Gale’s work applies the lens of material culture to consider how authority and identity is negotiated within political, social, and economic systems. Gale’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York); LACE (Los Angeles); Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles); Matthew Marks Gallery (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Rodeo Gallery (London); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Gale’s first European institutional solo exhibition will take place at London’s Chisenhale Gallery in 2022. Gale holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University, earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA, and now lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
For two decades, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork has explored the intersections of sound, installation, performance, and sculpture, crafting a practice that reimagines sonic materiality. Her work frequently draws attention to the ways that the built environment shapes the experience of sound and awareness. Sometimes, she does this by deploying architectures of her own, utilizing vinyl sheeting, acoustic foam, felted blankets, and other kinds of sonically functional materials in structures that maximize particular sonic effects. Other times, these concepts are embedded within materially significant sculptures that warp the experience of sound in their vicinity. Kiyomi Gork’s early background in dance, choreography and experimental music continues to inform her work, in which the discrete roles of performer, audience, and stage fluidly blur and collapse. Feedback systems, the history of sound art and synthesized audio, deep listening and music composition—Kiyomi Gork draws these elements together into an expansive multimodal practice.
Sara Ouhaddou’s dual French-Moroccan culture informs her practice as a continuous dialogue. She strikes a balance between craft and the conventions of contemporary art, aiming to place artistic creation’s forgotten cultural continuities into new perspectives. She works in situ, producing works based on encounters with communities, craftsmen and researchers, while exploring heritage sites and objects. Each of her works is a project of learning, exchange of knowledge and intimate or universal stories. A graduate of the École Olivier De Serres Paris, Ouhaddou’s work has been the subject of several international exhibitions including Hirafen, Ateliers C3T, Tunisie (2023), Moroccan Trilogy, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2021) ; Global resistance, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020) ; Manifesta Biennale, Marseille (2020) ; Our World is burning, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020), Marrakech Biennale, Maroc, (2016). In 2024, she took part in the Gherdeina Biennial and presented a solo exhibition at the MACAAL Museum of Contemporary Art in Marrakech and at the ifa-Galerie Berlin. She has also participated in programmes and residencies including Villa Albertine (2023), IASPIS Stockholm (2021/2022), Art Explora x La Cité Internationale des Arts (2021) and La Cité Internationale des Arts x Daniel et Nina Carasso (2020/2021).
Adrian Piper is a first-generation Conceptual artist who started exhibiting her work internationally at the age of twenty and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969. While continuing to produce and exhibit her artwork internationally, she received a B.A. in Philosophy from CCNY in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard in 1981 under the supervision of John Rawls. She studied Kant and Hegel with Dieter Henrich at the University of Heidelberg in 1977-1978, and taught philosophy fulltime for 30 years with specializations in metaethics and Kant. She was the first tenured woman Professor of acknowledged African descent in the field of philosophy. Her two-volume study in Kantian metaethics, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, integrates desire into reason and standard decision theory into classical predicate logic. Piper introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art and explicit political content into Minimalism. In 2000 she further expanded the vocabulary of Conceptual art to include Vedic philosophical imagery and concepts. She is the recipient of many fellowships and awards in art and philosophy, and her artwork is in many important collections. Her seventh traveling retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in the spring of 2018. Her artwork won the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis 2018 and the Kaiserring Kunstpreis 2021. Adrian has studied and practiced yoga since 1965, and lives and works in Berlin, where she runs the APRA Foundation Berlin.
Ana Paula Santana* is an artist based in Guadalajara who works in the fields of sound art, experimental music, graphic arts, ceramics, video, and installation. She holds a degree in Communication Sciences, a diploma in Literary Creation from SOGEM Mexico, and a master’s degree in Sound Art from the University of Barcelona. She has received grants from FONCA and PECDA and is currently a recipient of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. She uses the pseudonym Ana Fauna for musical productions and live performances. Founder and director of O.Y.E. Oficio y Experimentación, a space dedicated to the promotion and education of art and sound in Zapopan, Jalisco. *Part of Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.
Naama Tsabar’s practice fuses elements from sculpture, music, performance and architecture. Her interactive works expose hidden spaces and systems, reconceive gendered narratives, and shift the viewing experience to one of active participation. Tsabar draws attention to the muted and unseen by propagating sound through space and sculptural form. Between sculpture and instrument, form, and sound, Tsabar’s work lingers on the intimate, sensual, and corporeal potentials within this transitional state. Collaborating with local communities of female-identifying and gender non-conforming performers, Tsabar writes a new feminist and queer history of fluency. Tsabar’s first institutional exhibition in Germany opened at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, in 2024. She has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (as a MATRIX artist in 2022) and the Bass Museum, Miami, FL (2021-22). Additional solo exhibitions and performances have been presented at KinoSaito, Westchester County, NY (2022); the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (2019); Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland (2018); CCA Tel Aviv (2018); the Faena Art Center, Buenos Aires (2018); the Museum of Modern Art and Design, New York (2017-18); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); Prospect New Orleans (2017); High Line Art, New York (2016); MARTE-C, El Salvador (2015); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014); the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2013); and the Herziliya Museum for Contemporary Art, Israel (2006).
Karima Walker is an artist and musician living in Arizona. She works with research, performance, materials, video, and sound to critically position the mythologies, practices, and policies that shape perceptions and relationships to land. A touring musician for the past 10 years, her work has been featured in Pitchfork, NPR, MTV and The New Yorker Radio Hour. She holds certifications in Deep Listening and Rainwater Harvesting and is currently pursuing an MFA in Expanded Arts at Arizona State University.
About Channeling the Ear Artists
Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF) is an artist, curator, composer, poet, feminist and network weaver. She is also known as AGF, Laub and @poemproducer. Born in 1969 and raised in East Germany, she has lived and worked in Hailuoto, Finland since 2008. She works with language, sound, hearing, voice, moving image, poetry and communication, which finds expression in mixed media, live audiovisual performances, digital communication, sound installations, commissions for radio, film and theatre, exhibitions and conceptual works. Greie-Ripatti has released more than 30 albums and has been involved in numerous collaborations, including under the pseudonyms AGF, AGF/Delay (with Vladislav Delay), Greie Gut Fraktion (with Gudrun Gut) and The Lappetites (with Kaffe Matthews and Eliane Radigue), including – for an extended period – with award-winning classical composer Craig Armstrong. She runs the media art production company and music label AGF Producktion. In 2011, Greie-Ripatti founded the rural arts organisation Hai Art in Hailuoto, where she served as artistic director, executive producer and workshop leader until 2020. With Hai Art she has organised a conference on remote art, more than ten artist-in-residencies, an extensive sound programme with children in Hailuoto, the iPad Orchestra Hailuoto, Organum, the Hailuoto (mini) MediaLAB and numerous artist camps. AGF has worked as an independent curator of sound since 2011. Since 2020, she has been facilitating the internet exhibition project rec-on.org with a focus on sound-political listening and being. She continues to write radio pieces, dance pieces and hosts workshops, teaches and lectures.
Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called sound art, although her thought and creative practice consistently challenges key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of this nascent genre. Often considered to be part of a post-Cagean lineage, her work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies.
Jessica Ekomane is a French-born and Berlin-based electronic musician and sound artist. Her first LP Multivocal was released in 2019 via Important Records, stemming out of a project for a sleeping event at Ars Electronica, curated by Shu-Lea Chang and Matthew Füller. Since then, her work has been extensively presented in festivals, venues, contemporary art spaces and museums across the world such as Radio France, CTM festival, Berghain, Cafe OTO, Hamburger Bahnhof, Reina Sofia, Art Basel, KW, Villa Massimo… Her piece Manifolds was released in 2024 as a split LP with Laurel Halo on Portraits GRM / Shelter Press. She was one of the fellows in residence for the Villa Romana Prize 2023 in Florence and received one of the two ZKM Giga-Hertz production prizes that same year.
Christine Sun Kim is an American artist based in Berlin. Kim’s practice considers how sound operates in society, deconstructing the politics of sound and exploring how oral languages operate as social currency. Musical notation, written language, infographics, American Sign Language (ASL), the use of the body, and strategically deployed humor are all recurring elements in her practice. Working across drawing, performance, video and large scale murals, Kim explores her relationship to spoken and signed languages, to her built and social environments, and to the world at large. Kim’s work has been extensively exhibited and performed internationally. She is represented by François Ghebaly Gallery and WHITE SPACE.
Katalin Ladik (b. 1942, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia) is a poet, visual artist and actress. Her visual and sound poetry, performances and body art are based on the intermedial reinterpretation of body and language, sound and visuality. From around 1960-62, the very beginning of Ladik’s career, a fundamental aspect of her poems was their chantability, and by the end of the sixties, phonic poetry and performance had unequivocally become her most important genres. A major aspect of her work is feminism: from her earliest performances she used her own body as a medium – equivalent to text and sound, creating multi-identities of different sexes and personalities on stage. The use of clothing patterns on her collage- verses also critically highlight the traditional women’s roles. Besides her performances and visual works, Ladik’s production in radio, theatre and movies has been extensive, as have her recordings of music and sound poetry. After 1976 she became an important figure in the scene of international sound poetry. Since the late 1970s she has been a participant of several international exhibitions, her works were recently featured at documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens (2017), at Shedhalle Zurich (2018) and at IVAM Valencia (2019) among others. Large scale and retrospective exhibitions of Katalin Ladik were presented at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2024-2025), Ludwig Forum in Aachen (2024), Haus der Kunst in Munich (2023-2024), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vojvodina (Novi Sad, Serbia, 2011). Her works can be found in the collections of the Tate, the MoMA in New York, and the MACBA in Barcelona among others.
Leyya Mona Tawil (Lime Rickey International) is an artist, curator, and cultural activist. She works in sound art, dance, and hybrid transmissions. Tawil is a Syrian, Palestinian, American engaged in the world as such. Her works have toured throughout Europe, the Arab region, and the US. Performances and commissions include ISSUE Project Room (NYC), Abrons Arts Center (NYC), KONE Foundation (Helsinki), ZVRK Festival (Bosnia), The Lab (SF), Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa), and the Arab American National Museum (Dearborn). Lime Rickey International’s FUTURE FAITH was nominated for a 2019 “Bessies” Award in Music (NYC). Tawil is also the founder/director of Arab.AMP – a platform for experimental live art, music, and ideas from the SWANA diaspora and region.
Audra Wolowiec is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work engages the visual and material aspects of sound and language. She is interested in how sound can create spaces of listening and connection. Wolowiec’s work has been shown internationally and in the United States at MASS MoCA, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, ICA at MECA, Stony Brook University, and Art in General. Readings and events have taken place at The Poetry Project, Microscope Gallery, and Center for Performance Research. Interviews and reviews have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Artforum, The New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, and Sound American. Recent residencies include Institute for Electronic Arts (iea) at Alfred University, Center for Book Arts, and an Artist Fellowship at the New York Public Library Picture Collection. Wolowiec teaches at Parsons School of Design and directs the publishing platform Gravel Projects.
About the Guest Curator
Bhavisha Panchia is a curator and writer of contemporary art. Her curatorial and written work centres on the social, cultural and ideological signification of sound and music in contemporary culture. With an interest in auditory media’s relationship to geopolitical paradigms, anti/postcolonial discourses and imperial histories, she considers how we can critically listen back to listen forward. She has curated programs and exhibitions locally and internationally, some of which include Sounding a Black Grammar (New York, 2023), Sounding the Void, Imaging the Orchestra V.1, A4 Arts Foundation (2019), ’32: The Rescore, Sharjah Art Foundation (2019), For the Record, ifa-Galerie Berlin (2018); writing for the eye, writing for the ear, Centre for the Less Good Idea (2018); and Buried in the Mix, MEWO Kunsthalle (2017). She is the founder of Nothing to Commit Records, a label and publishing platform committed to the production and expansion of knowledge related to contemporary art and sound within and across the global South. Panchia holds a BA Fine Arts Degree and MA History of Art Degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, an MA in Curatorial Practice from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York, and a PhD in Art History from Rhodes University, Makhanda.
About Nothing to Commit Records
Nothing To Commit Records (NTCR) is a research and publishing platform committed to the production and expansion of knowledge related to contemporary art, writing and music within and across the global South. Founded and under the artistic direction of Bhavisha Panchia, NTCR operates as a platform, record label, and collection. The project is dedicated to working with writers, artists, composers, curators, musicians, programmers and DJs to encourage dialogue and collaborations between practitioners globally. One of the platform’s more direct concerns is dedicated to exploring the social and ideological signification of sound and music to rethink the social, spatial and geopolitical. Its collection of artist-produced records serves to produce an archive for future consideration and exploration.