Sound artistes gathered with audio works and presented listening as a form of ecological and emotional care in the Delhi edition of The Listening Biennial

When a violent storm tore through Delhi earlier this year, Malvika Bhatia was listening to the devastating chaos — to the splintered trunks, the rustling leaves, and the thunderstorm. Her sound work, As Above, So Below recalls that meditation on grief, decay and the interrupted cycles of the city’s dying trees.

New Delhi plays host to the Delhi edition of The Listening Biennial

Bhatia’s work, consisting of recordings of storms, the crash of falling trees, and even conversations she had with them, was on display at the exhibition, ‘The Listening Biennial’ at Delhi’s Khoj Studio, on view from October 9-14. It is being presented across 25 locations internationally from August 21 to October 26.

The artist, who has been walking through Delhi’s forests since she was 12, recalls how the unseasonal rains in May and June devastated several trees she had grown close to over the years. An overwhelming sense of loss soon crept over the artist. “It hit me when I realised that these fallen trees wouldn’t be left for fungi to feed on,” she says. “They would be cut and cleared away. Their death felt incomplete and unnatural.”

Bhatia notes that speaking to a tree or a mushroom opens a channel of communication. Besides these voice notes, Bhatia’s works also contain zines and a small collection of fungi and mushrooms she gathered from forests like Jahanpanah and Sanjay Van. The collection is influenced by her practice of ethnomycology — the study of relationships between people and fungi. 

The other works at the display featured video and audio installations by Burmese photographer, Shew Wutt Hmon, France-based Elena Lucca’s sound notes of winds, among others. 

‘Third listening’ 

Curated by Alecia Neo, Brandon LaBelle, Soledad García Saavedra, and Suvani Suri, the Delhi programme of The Listening Biennial 2025, in its third edition, recognises the concept of the ‘Third Listening’. 

The curatorial note describes ‘Third Listening’ as “a form of interstitial listening intent on sensing and staying with the differential urgencies spanning cultural and material worlds.”

On the other hand, Suri, who is an artist herself, says, “‘Third Listening’ is thinking about the relational capacity of sound to produce a third space — something between the self and another.  It’s about how we listen to something which is not fully knowable or graspable.” She speaks of the show as “a site of relational encounters,” where sound is a way to hold together seemingly disparate worlds — of oneself and others.  

The show features around 34 artworks by 27 artists as a part of the global Biennial, says the curator. These are distributed across seven “rooms” (or listening zones). 

While talking about the selection of art pieces exhibited at the Biennial, she adds, “I looked at how works speak to one another,” giving the example of two pieces that highlighted songs remembered from different sites of labour and protest. “There are pieces about histories in Kashmir, alongside works about sites in between antiquity and modernity in Egypt, and a piece that pertain to Sufi shrines in Sri Lanka, and Ladakhi myths.”  

“There’s a room that thinks through swaying, air and intertidal landscapes; a room that holds questions of home, belonging, migration and labour; and a room that looks at resounds with the resonance of cities, peripheries and forgotten places,” Suri says referring to the installations at the exhibition.

Fermenting memories 

‘Mourn!ng: A fermented ritual for the mundane spirits from Shunyosthan’ displayed three jars — abuzz with soft music — with their lids closed. 

While speaking about their artwork — created through a collaborative soundwork with Amy Singh, Pramukho Rupan, and RENU — trans-binary artist-researcher Kaur Chimuk says the piece was inspired from “Shunyosthan”. Shunyosthan, as described by Chimuk, is “a state of entropy, unborn — an opening that invites our randomness to move closer to the highest probability of chaos.”

The artwork is an extended observation of the research project ‘A South-Asian Queer Pamphlet’, which explores transition, temporality, and counter-rituals beyond colonial frameworks. Before composing the sound for the project, the artists spoke with people from diverse backgrounds, gathering stories from everyday lives to those lived through Partition.

“It’s a method of re-fermenting memory so that missing votmices can be heard differently,” Chimuk notes. Hence, listening, for Chimuk, rejuvenates what history forgets and retrieves remembrance through communal, multilingual voices.

(Written by Pankil Jhajhria)