“A Foreign Silence“
Nour Sokhon
TX: Monday, 14 September⋅12:00 – 12:30pm
Wednesday, 16th September 6:00-6:30pm
A Foreign Silence is an electroacoustic radiophonic work composed from voice, field recordings, and archival sound collected across Beirut, Palestine, and Vienna between 2023 and 2026. The composition draws primarily on material gathered through Do You Hear The Silence?, a participatory walk-in listening installation developed in collaboration with Joanna Zabielska during Sokhon’s 2025 residency with philomena+ and kulturen in bewegung in Vienna.
Rooted in experiences of being silenced, A Foreign Silence approaches silence through memory, testimony, and lived experience. Drawing on archival sound, field recordings, and voices gathered through interviews, the work reflects on what emerges when speech is interrupted or withheld. It asks: what do we associate with the absence of sound? What can silence reveal? And how are experiences of silence shaped by geopolitical realities?
Music, sound composition, interview, field recording & sound collection: Nour Sokhon
‘Do You Hear The Silence?’ Inflatable sculpture: Joanna Zabielska
Photo documentation: Ibrahim Dirani Independent Space Index – festival – 2025 30.5-1.6.2025
Based between Beirut and Berlin, Nour Sokhon’s practice draws on archival methods and the activation of inanimate matter as living narrators, taking the form of sound and music pieces, performances, interactive installations, and moving-image works. She earned a master’s degree of Design in Sound for the Moving Image from The Glasgow School of Art. She received the Emerging Artist Prize from the Sursock Museum in 2019, for a moving image piece entitled ‘Revisiting: Hold Your Breath’ and was awarded the Sound Art 2020 scholarship by Lower Saxony and the University of Fine Arts in يب†Braunschweig. In the fall of 2024 Beirut Birds / ط†ور†روت†, Sokhon’s debut solo album, was digitally released on aural conduct and was produced with the support of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture – AFAC.
She has exhibited her artwork internationally and performed in various sound/ music festivals including This Is Not Lebanon (2021), Punkt Festival (2023), Gaudeamus Festival (2023), United in Grief (2024), Vorspiel (2024), the Biennale d’Aix (2024), Salam Music (2025), Mapping Sounds in Exile (2025), IFFI (2025), Avant Art Festival Berlin (2025), Expressions D’elles #5 (2026), Sonic Acts (2026), Sauna Festival: Saturation (2026), Art Explora (2026) and Lips #3 – Souffle (2026). Her work has also been shown at institutions such as Spatial Sound Institute, Beirut Art Center, SAVVY Contemporary, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Silent Green, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, GMEM, Frankfurt Lab, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Kampnagel Hamburg, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) and La Condition Publique.
