TAIPEI.- “Attunements—are they not like cloud shadows flitting across the landscape, utterly fleeting and elusive?”—“Description of the Situation: Fundamental Attunement” by Martin Heidegger
“The most perfect music first responds to human affairs, then accords with the principles of the Universe and aligns with the Five Virtues. Only then can it bring order to the spontaneity of Nature itself, harmonize the four seasons, and achieve perfect attunement among all living things.”—“Outer Chapter: The Revolution of Heaven,” in the Zhuangzi
How might we attune our bodies and minds in an era characterized as much by potential as polycrisis of environmental upheaval and shifting geopolitical possibilities? Curated by Hsu Fang-Tze, Attunement: Contemporary Politics between Mindscape and Soundscape brings together the work of thirteen artists who deploy sound as a political and ecological medium. In other words, to investigate humanity’s entanglement with environmental justice, border politics, and the socio-economy of the world writ large. Sound, the exhibition proposes, connects us to our surroundings, and to one another, through the process of attunement.
The exhibition’s framework draws from two distinct philosophies of nature. In a lecture from 1929-1930 on the concept of the "world" in relation to human finitude, Martin Heidegger compared attunement to a doubly ephemeral “cloud shadow” drifting across a landscape, offering a sublime account of nature. Heidegger’s ethical orientation to a shared world is particularly pertinent when juxtaposed with Zhuangzi's concept of "perfect music," which describes a way to tune oneself in the world of impermanence and harmonises all forms of life. By attuning rather than merely listening to the sounds around us, the artists in this exhibition suggest that we might resonate more radically with other forms of collective presence.
The participating artists share a commitment to acknowledging the dissonances of their material realities and environments. Their array of artistic media and techniques reflects their cacophonous enterprise: from Chinese ink scroll paintings and bioelectrodes to field recordings, studies of sonic warfare across history, pre-radar military acoustic devices from World War I, and the propaganda songs that a legendary diva carried across the Cold War division of the Taiwan Strait, the exhibition’s breadth reflects the widening field of sonic practice in contemporary art and, more crucially, foregrounds the context-specific histories and cosmic affinities that the artworks invoke. Attunement invites audiences to listen and to reposition themselves within a contested terrain that imbricates environmental degradation, nationalist rhetoric, and frequencies of capital. Through its constructed soundscape, the exhibition insists that how we listen can materially shape how we share the world. Organized around the interconnected elements of water, air, and earth, the exhibition traces how atmospheric forces shape the contemporary world.
The artists move beyond auditory perception toward attunement as a perceptual and ethical orientation, where listeners become entwined with, and transformed by, the world's resonant field. Across works that explore interdependent contexts, audiences are encouraged to move beyond passive listening and toward a situated sense of sound that acknowledges our interdependence with all living and non-living entities. Participating artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Tarek Atoui, Ting-Jung Chen, Reena Saini Kallat, Kei Imazu and Bagus Pandega, Susan Schuppli, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Hajra Waheed, Lin Chi-Wei, Samson Young, Yuan Jai, Yu Cheng-Yao.
