TUCSON, AZ.- MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) Tucson presents Frequencies, an exhibition featuring a group of contemporary artists who explore the dynamic possibilities of sound. Working across sculpture, architecture, video, performance, and image, these artists foreground the physical and affective dimensions of sound. Together, they invite us to consider how sound is relational — shaping and shaped by the contexts in which it resonates.
Attending to the audible and inaudible traces of the world, the artists propose sound as a conduit for transgressing boundaries and a catalyst for transformation and action. Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork and Ana Paula Santana’s installations employ transposition and resonance to explore how sound is shaped by environment, material, and movement. With layered scores that emerge from live and recorded performance, video installations by Alluvium and Sofía Córodva and sculptural terrains by Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez and Karima Walker center the body and sensation to address the entangled relations between humans, land, and ecological systems. Nikita Gale imagines the ruins of a post-human future shaped by climate change, animated by the interplay of forces between water and drums. Naama Tsabar’s industrial felt compositions incorporate piano strings that invite touch to meditate on transformation and potential, while Adrian Piper uses voice to draw awareness to the present through repetition and exhaustion. Vivian Caccuri and Sara Ouhaddou examine the social and cultural significance of musical traditions through subwoofers and graphic scores.
Frequencies also features Channeling the Ear, a space dedicated to intimate listening experiences. Visitors are invited to engage with books, vinyl records, and audio materials that function as sites for experimentation, expression, and improvisation by artists and musicians including 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.
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.
