next_generation XI – Installations

Fatemeh Barzkar Homage to Khayyam: Where Is the Potter? Where the Buyer? Where the Seller?, (2026), sound installation for handmade vessels, player modules, MP3 players & headphones 

This installation explores death as a process of transformation within nature, inspired by poems of the Persian poet and polymath Omar Khayyam (1048–1131). In these verses, Khayyam imagines that clay vessels are formed from the bodies of former kings and lovers, reminding us that all things are mortal and ultimately return to soil. Fragments of these poems are played in Farsi, German, and English through speakers hidden inside clay pots and vessels. Visitors move through the space wearing headphones that emit white noise recorded from the sound of soil and nature. As they walk and sit among the vessels, they attempt to listen to the voices outside the headphones, yet the white noise continually masks and dissolves those sounds. Here, the headphones are not instruments for attentive listening but devices of obstruction. They suggest that the full spectrum of frequencies contains and absorbs sound, just as nature ultimately absorbs all bodies. Listening becomes an act of struggle, mirroring the fragile attempt to grasp meaning within an ever encompassing continuum.

The name of the installation comes from a poem by Khayyam:

Last night I wandered into the potter’s shed, 
Where countless silent pots were lying, dead.
Suddenly one vessel cried aloud in fear:
“Where is the potter? Where the buyer? Where the seller?“

در کارگه کوزه گری رفتم دوش
دیدم دوهزار کوزه گویا و خموش
ناگه یکی کوزه برآورد خروش
کو کوزه گر و کوزه خر و کوزه فروش

Léa Aimée Birrer (de)harmonized networks, (2025), sound installation for 3 iPhones & stereo audio, ca. 8‘30‘‘

In today’s world
What is socially perceived as disruption?
Which voices are dismissed as noise, and which are recognised as harmony within society?
In this work, I explore a new understanding of global resistance and connectedness beyond national affiliation, using slowly evolving harmonic layers to shape a sonic language of collective expression – a (de)harmonized soundscape of a networked youth.

Inspired by a wave of Gen Z protests and uprisings that began in Nepal in autumn 2025 and led to riots in various countries of the Global Majority (such as Nepal, Mangolia, Madagascar, Philipines, Indonesia, Marocco, Kenia and Peru) I started working with shared footage of those protests on TikTok and combined them with synthetic soundscapes.


Odilia Flurina Senn Humming as Form for Resistance (2025), sound installation for sculptures made of wax and wire, ca. 17’

This work is inspired by Sumedha Bhanacharyya and her reflections on care and resistance. Building on this, I explored humming as a form of collective stability and as a practice of connection. In bee colonies and human communities, shared sound serves as orientation, care, and resistance. The humming of bees is an expression of collective intelligence, an acoustic network of cooperation and protection. Human humming, too, can be a space of “care” - a gentle resistance against isolation and silencing. In this context, beeswax represents a collective memory that stores warmth and forms safe spaces. By bringing together the voices of bees and humans, a field of resonance emerges that makes the communal audible: holding one another, mutual support, and contributing to one another in a quiet, powerful connectedness.