The Sound of

Artist: Hajra Waheed, Emeka Ogboh, Julian Abraham “Togar,” People Who Stutter Create, Cally Spooner, Clara Mosconi, Arendse Krabbe, and more

The Sound of is a curatorial collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde and Moderna Museet Malmö. The exhibition explore the poetic, social, and political potentials of sound in contemporary art. We hear voices humming, singing, or humans speaking together about everything from the infrastructure of the toilet to political censorship and resistance. We hear the sounds of a distant desert, the limitations of language, and the social and playful elements of music. Through participation and improvisation, visitors are invited to experience sound not as spectacle but as a mode of being, a way of opening ourselves to our surroundings and to one another.

Waves of humming fills the great hall at Sankt Hans by Roskilde Fjord. Hajra Waheed’s HUM (2020) is the first volume of her trilogy of multichannel sound installations, which foregrounds political prisoners as leaders of liberation struggles and traces voice under conditions of incarceration. The singers and songwriters whose work informs the installation have all been imprisoned and censored, with many forced into exile for mobilizing a collective voice. The songs emerge from histories that, as today, are marked by state violence and genocide, mass uprisings, and political repression. From this shared condition of silencing, the work turns to humming as a compositional method, a form of resistance, and a response to censorship, transforming an imposed condition of being silenced into a collective act of resistance. Installed as a sixteen-channel environment, the title HUM in Urdu, the artist’s mother tongue, means “we”: the work positions itself not as a memorial to political imprisonment but as an insistence on collective voice, solidarity, and the enduring role of political prisoners within movements for freedom and justice.

In the ruins of Sankt Ibs Church, Hanne Lippard presents Vox Humana (2026), a new site-specific sound work created in direct response to the building’s nearly 1,000-year history and acoustics. A freestanding curved metal structure, slender and light against the church’s massive stone walls, suspends speakers from its top. From them, a voice moves rhythmically through the space, approaching through repetitive and poetic language questions about the absence and presence of a body, about how the voice is experienced as something physical, and how a space can respond with resonance.

Julian Abraham “Togar” presents Drummers Gonna Drum #3 & #4 (2023/2026) alongside the installation and sound studio KETOK STUDIO (2020–ongoing). The video works move between the island of Run in the Eastern Indonesian archipelago and Manhattan, New York — two places connected through a colonial exchange in 1667, when Britain traded Run for Dutch-controlled Manhattan. With drumsticks and a steady rhythm, Togar moves through landscapes and urban spaces, drumming on nutmeg trees, buildings, pavements, water, and other surfaces, allowing sound to reveal and connect with place. KETOK STUDIO extends Togar’s interest in improvisation and community: local music scenes and visitors are invited to co-create the space through jam sessions, rehearsals, and improvised concerts, dissolving the boundaries between artwork, performance, and social gathering.

Emeka Ogboh’s Interlude (2026) is both a beer and a sound installation developed in close collaboration with brewery To Øl, proposes tasting as a practice of sustained attention, asking how we might slow down long enough for something to reveal itself. Rather than representing sound through flavour, the project asks: how do we pay attention? In the Turbine Hall at Moderna Museet Malmö, Ogboh presents new installation As Things Stand (2026), in which a rotating sculpture more than five metres high is combined with multichannel sound and LED screens displaying real-time news feeds. Drawing on Ijele - the largest masquerade figure in Igbo culture - the work creates a space for collective reflection on the social, political and economic conditions of the present.

The collective People Who Stutter Create explores how stuttering can generate new forms of listening, presence and community. On the orange façade of Moderna Museet Malmö, the work Stuttering Can Create Time (2024–ongoing) is presented through ten-metre-high vertical banners, where repetitions, prolongations and pauses become visual expressions of the rhythm and resistance of speech.

Curators: Christian Skovbjerg Jensen (Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde) and Andreas Nilsson (Moderna Museet Malmö)