June 6, 2025–January 4, 2026
Chatou 78400
France
Hours: Wednesday–Friday 11am–6pm
Saturday–Sunday 10am–6pm
A new exhibition at the Musée d'Art et de Culture Soufis MTO explores the dialogue between Sufism and sound.
Resonant: Bodies, Songs, and Strings, the next exhibition in the museum’s programme opening to the public on the 6th June 2025, is an immersive project that explores how knowledge circulates through sound, vibration, and listening. Conceived as both a sensory and introspective experience, the exhibition brings together contemporary artworks in conversation with a selection of Sufi pieces from the museum’s permanent collection.
Works by fourteen international contemporary artists, some of whom are exhibiting in Paris for the first time, will be on display in this exhibition. The exhibition features new commissions by artists Rada Akbar, Brook Andrew, Meris Angioletti, Paula Valero Comín, JJJJJerome Ellis, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, and Sara Ouhaddou, with additional works by Nevin Aladağ, Katy'taya Catitu Tayassu, Célia Gondol, Yoshimi Futamura, Guadalupe Maravilla, Vesna Petresin and Charwei Tsai.
Curated by Elena Sorokina and Simona Dvorák, with curatorial advisors Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care (RCI), the exhibition invites visitors on a meditative journey where sound, vibration, and listening become tools of transmission, healing, and collective memory.
The exhibition unfolds across three floors, bringing together installations, sound works, and ritual objects.
On the first floor, contemporary artworks are presented alongside Sufi objects from the museum’s collection—including rosaries, calligraphy, and kashkūl—revealing the connections between sound, symbolic forms, and meaning.
The second floor engages with Sufi practices of teaching and transmission. Here, featured artists enter into dialogue with symbolic instruments, manuscripts, and poetic texts, all set against the backdrop of the museum’s Persian garden. At the heart of this constellation is the setār, a traditional stringed Sufi instrument, which becomes a powerful metaphor for the human body: a resonant chamber that receives, amplifies, and transmits vibrations that transcend the realm of language.
On the third floor, sound emerges as a force of healing and transformation. Participating artists blur the boundaries between body, music, and spirit. Through multisensory installations and sonic rituals, they demonstrate how sound can mend, connect, and carry meaning—revealing knowledge as a shared vibration.
JJJJJerome Ellis, Music for the Garden
8:30pm (in the garden, weather permitting)
As part of the Resonant: Bodies, Songs, and Strings exhibition, JJJJJerome Ellis presents Music for the Garden, a performance conceived for the museum. Known for their sonic work blending music, poetry, and improvisation, Ellis is an Afro-Caribbean composer, poet, performer, and proud stutterer.
In harmony with the clouds, the sun, and the stars, Music for the Garden combines live saxophone, electronic sound, and spoken word into a resonant composition. Set in MACS MTO's symbolic garden, the work is what the artist calls "a musical offering for all species." The performance engages with the garden’s medicinal and aromatic flora, especially its roses, which symbolize the soul's journey and pursuit of wholeness. The central fountain, representing purification and life, connects with the surrounding nature, creating a seamless experience where every element contributes to the composition. Ellis refers to the experience as a sound bath, an offering of resonance designed to soothe body and mind and to honor the memory of water, which carries vibration and emotion. Sound here becomes a vessel for love, joy, and healing, transforming listening into an act of attunement and communion—of sensing the invisible currents beneath the surface and opening a new way of knowing. In this way, Ellis invites us to celebrate the profound kinship between human and the more-than-human world.
