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  • Ex Situ

    Ex Situ

    Dates

    August 18, 2023Mad Time Warp by party office
    Rehearsing Moves on Hazy Paths
    ZK/U
    July 22, 2023Mad Time Warp by party office
    Nida Art Colony
    June 18 – September 25 2022Mad Time Warp by party office
    documenta fifteen
    1-11 September 2022Sculpture Exhibit at Queer Week
    Maxim Gorki Theater

    Ex Situ is a collaborative project between HYENAZ, Gambian griot descendant Yusuph Suso, with technical assistance from Lau Bau and Rodrigo Frenk. The work manifests as an audiovisual sculpture, generative music video, and evolving interactive artwork accessible via smartphone or laptop—a cartography of the fragile technological threads tethering transdimensional lives across past, present, and future homelands.

    The sculpture’s core comprises a levitating network of scratched mobile phones counterbalanced in midair. Each device loops randomized audiovisual fragments, generating an ever-shifting musical narrative. This kinetic architecture draws inspiration from Maxine Burkett’s “Nation Ex-Situ” concept, which advocates for the associative rights of diasporic peoples which highlights the rights to association of the growing number of people who have lost the physical location of their former homes, but who maintain bonds nonetheless as they roam across disparate locations.

    BuyBandcamp
    StreamSpotify · Apple · YouTube · Tidal · Deezer · SoundCloud

    From their Foreign Bodies research, HYENAZ observed how human beings in movement often orbit clusters of phones and power banks—digital hearths glowing with the embers of family and memory. Our devices locate us where we come from, where we are, and where we are going.

    In Ex Situ, these devices carry imagery and audio of Suso, whom the collective met en route to a Sicilian detention center. A former refugee, Suso was there to act as an interpreter for migrants navigating the bureaucratic intricacies of the Italian migration system. WIthin moments, Suso shared his identity as a griot, a descendant from a long lineage of court musicians stretching back to the Malian empire.

    Following this serendipitous encounter, the trio recorded interviews and vocals in Mandinka and English. Suso later shared smartphone footage from Gambia—raw materials HYENAZ transmuted into sonic/visual shards distributed across the suspended phones. The work invites global contributors to add migration stories via digital interfaces, asserting free movement as both human right and survival imperative.

    As gallery installation, video EP (featuring a Sky Deep remix), and participatory web platform, Ex Situ draws us into a collective hive of dreams and memories, that the drive to phone home persists even as lifeworlds sink, dissolve, or are displaced.

    Credits

    Text & VocalsYusuph Suso
    Music and ConceptHyenaz
    Sculpture DesignLau Bau
    VideographyYusuph Suso
    Video EditHyenaz
    Creative CodeRodrigo Frenk
    RemixSky Deep
    Supported byMusikfonds, Neustart Kultur, Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien
  • Art and Extractivism Reading Group

    Art and Extractivism Reading Group

    Dates

    23 & 30 May, 6 & 13 June, 2023Hopscotch Reading Room (Berlin)
    27 June 2022Kampnagel (Hamburg)
    25 September 2022Casa Tranzit (Cluj)
    23 September 2022Atelierele Malmaison (Bucharest)
    14 September 2021Synth Library (Prague)
    14 August 2021Kombinatas Left Festival (Lithuania)

    The reading group prioritizes collective close reading as a deliberate counterpractice to Western academic hegemony, linguistic hierarchies, and the artificial divide between institutional and non-institutional knowledge. Sessions require no long-term commitment, centering accessibility for artists and workers excluded from academic resources or time-intensive research. Non-native speakers are supported through collaborative translation and definition.

    The project interrogates how extractive dynamics—environmental (mineral/gas/water exploitation), intellectual (appropriation of ideas, sounds, labor), and aesthetic (“mining the for branding for branding)—permeate sonic and performative arts. It asks: How do hierarchical collaborations normalize extraction? Can such processes resist their own dynamics? What are the framework’s limits? How might reciprocal artist-subject-nature relations emerge?

    Methodology

    Participants select a text (chapter or excerpt) to read collectively during sessions, rejecting preparatory labor. Dialogue prioritizes utility for members’ real-world work over academic abstraction, resisting institutional pressures by centering non-academics. The group fosters engagement with critical theory outside traditional academic spaces, emphasizing lived experience over performative expertise.

  • Signals

    Signals

    Dates

    11-13 April 202512th International Video POETRY FESTIVAL ATHENS
    15-17 June 2023membra(I)nes: 12th Annual Conference of the Gender Studies Association
    Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle and Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
    20 May 2023Sivan Ben Yishai: Wit(h)nessing
    Haus der Berliner Festspiele
    6 June 2021Washington DC’s Sound Scene Festival “EMERGE”

    Signals explores the notion of performativity in the form of codes, signs, drag, and masks in order to emerge from the darkness as visible.

    Signals become methods of translation, channels through which our voices become audible and understood. Bodies emerge into forms which are recognized and codified; modes through which we can be understood and called into subjectivity. An audio work and a video essay, Signals explores the process of emergence especially as it relates to the a/Artist into cultural spaces of power, those who hold or desire to hold the microphone.

    STREAMSpotify · Apple Music · YouTube Music · Tidal · Deezer
    BUYBandcamp

    Using multiple distinct voices and perspectives, both sung and written, Signals explores the process through which one emerges through the implementation of signals like masks, codes, dress, and language in order to achieve audibility, visibility and thus access. What is this process of emergence? Who stands at the gate? What is gained and lost in this process?

    HYENAZ create all their sound works from original field recordings; the particular context for these recordings were an anarcha-feminist anti-military conference which brought together activists from throughout and beyond Eastern Europe and central Asia. Together the members of the conference struggled to bridge knowledges, contexts and experiences. HYENAZ want to especially thank the voices and brave activists who were present there.

    Signals is the 4th audio visual work in Foreign Bodies, commissioned by Sound Scene Festival, Washington DC in 2021, with support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Goethe Institut.

    Credits

    Text, Vocals, Music & VideoKathryn (Roi) Fischer & Adrienne Teicher
  • Foreign Bodies

    Foreign Bodies

    Foreign Bodies is a sonic and somatic exploration of bodies in multiplicity: bodies in motion and migration; bodies managed by internal and external forces; bodies navigating boundaries imposed by others, bodies negotiating boundaries they set for themselves; bodies in flux; bodies synchronicity; bodies in resistance to management and control. In 2025, we began staging Foreign Bodies as a series called, “Animacies,” which has synthesised this ten year long work into live interactive performance presentations, each one slightly different from the other depending on the context.

    The project initially emerged as a response to paranoid narratives around migration into Europe, Australia, and the United States—different locations in which HYENAZ’s constructed versions of “home”. What truly interests HYENAZ is how movement continually reshapes subjectivity, and how subjectivity, in turn, dictates both how bodies move and how bodies are allowed to move.

    While some traverse borders as unchecked tourists, others risk death to migrate—a brutal asymmetry so utterly normalized that it is easy to forget that there is nothing normal about it at all. It has a history, it has a structure, it has interests, and it is these contingencies and determinations that HYENAZ wish to map.

    Foreign Bodies likewise interrogates the very notion of the “foreign,” whether weaponized through xenophobic fear or inadvertently perpetuated through allyship that exoticizes the Other. HYENAZ seek to trace the ways we produce the unknowable subject within our own communities and even within our own bodies

    HYENAZ work through field recordings – materialisations of time, people and places, which, when played back, produce temporary sound sculptures in the air, and from these fragments the duo creates artworks probing authority, consent, and proximity. Their itinerant research—via trains, buses, bicycles, and hitchhiking—led them to migrant camps, transit zones, communes, and artist colonies, over the course of ten years.

    These inquiries have expanded beyond initial scope, compelling HYENAZ to examine how humans construct the Otherness of fellow beings—whether human, animal, plant, or stone, and how that attitude binds or unbinds the self to experience the world in all its senses.

    Works