Unsound is an international festival of experimental and electronic music, known for boldly combining sound with other fields of art and thought. This year, part of the festival’s accompanying discussion program—featuring panels, presentations, and conversations on music, culture, and social phenomena—is taking place in the Studio Gallery foyer. It is a space for in-depth reflection and the exchange of ideas, complementing the festival’s concert program. You can find the full schedule of events below; we invite you to join us. Admission is free.
Monday, 05.10.2026
12.30 Discussion: What the Folk? // The Future of Tradition, mod. Ben Wheeler, Joanna Sztucka (Tercet Imperial), Łucja Siedlik (Radical Polish Ansambl), Milkweed (both), Debit
From a resurgence of interest in collective practices, archival sources and contemporary ensembles, folk music is having a moment. Yet it is also in a tough spot – local traditions are often co-opted by conservative political movements under claims of ‘heritage,’ with little care for actual preservation or support. Meanwhile, artists from both outside and within the communities that preserve these traditions often give folk music a new lease of life, engaging in an important dialogue with the past. In this discussion with Joanna Sztucka of Tercet Imperial, Łucja Siedlik of Polish Radical Ansambl, Milkweed and Debit, moderated by musicologist Ben Wheeler, we will consider what futures lie ahead of folk music, emphasising models of experimentation, interaction, and reciprocation, while also asking where inspiration ends and appropriation begins.
14:15 Guided tour of “Dirty Pages. Karol Radziszewski and DIK Fagazine” with Karol Radziszewski
You’re invited to a guided tour of the exhibition led by the artist. Karol Radziszewski’s Dirty Pages exhibition expands on the theme of queer archives in Central and Eastern Europe. It centres on DIK Fagazine, a publication that has brought together art, queerness, archival practices, and independent culture for more than two decades. Extending the publication’s own logic, the exhibition approaches it not as a closed object but as a space for the production of knowledge, desire, and resistance.
The title refers both to the materiality of print and to what has long been considered ‘dirty’: pornography, homosexuality, marginal publications, and histories pushed beyond the boundaries of official archives. At the heart of the exhibition are magazines, photographs, Polaroids, and Radziszewski’s private archives, alongside works by other artists that serve as testimonies to desire and memory.
Throughout Radziszewski’s practice, eroticism intertwines with the archive, and the body with politics. Dirty Pages examines the tension between private experience and official memory, revealing how images, publications, and ephemeral materials can become tools for recovering forgotten histories and imagining queer worlds. Ultimately, the exhibition tells the story of how alternative ways of writing history emerge from the margins – geographical, social, sexual, and political.
15:45 Presentation: Club Commons, Anjali Prashar-Savoie, ex.sses
Can moving bodies grow movements? How can we – the movers, shakers, dancers, ravers – wield and reroute the soft power of the dancefloor? Club Commons is a sonic performance and lecture built through music and spoken word, developed by writer Anjali Prashar-Savoie with sound artist and musician ex.sses. Drawing on Anjali’s debut book, Club Commons: Moving Bodies to Grow Movements in Queer Nightlife and Beyond (Velocity Press, 2026), the piece is rooted in almost a century of London’s queer nightlife. It explores pressure – social, spatial and sonic – with ex.sses’s textural music foregrounding the body as both the site where soft power lands and where refusal might begin.
Tuesday, 06.10.2026
12:30 Discussion: Critical Listening: Warszawa Liz Pelly, Max Alper (Peretsky), Piotr Kurek, Wilhelm Sasnal, Mat Schulz
As the story goes, in 1976, David Bowie wandered off a train in Warsaw and was captivated by a record of local folk music, which he would go on to reinterpret with Brian Eno on the Low track ‘Warszawa’. Fifty years later, at this year’s Unsound, Polish composer Piotr Kurek and artist Wilhelm Sasnal will reinterpret the original folk song through music and visuals, accompanied by the Śląsk Song & Dance Ensemble, who made the original recording. In this live podcast taping, Critical Listening co-hosts Liz Pelly and Max Alper are joined by Kurek, Sasnal, and Unsound co-founder and project curator Mat Schulz for a conversation on the nature of musical influence and interpretation today.
On one hand, Unsound’s WARSZAWA reclaims a Polish song that Bowie tended to describe more like a hazy, distant dream than as the actual source material for his composition, raising questions about crediting, co-optation and the creative process. At the same time, today’s music business has become increasingly litigious, often losing sight of how artistic ideas are created and exchanged, while AI products aim to invisibilise lineages, mechanise creativity, and boost ahistoricism and contextlessness. It all raises the question: could a song like ‘Warszawa’ even exist in 2026?
14:15 Presentation: How to Kill a Language?, Sophia Smith Galer
From the cultural prestige of dominant languages to colonial coercion, war, migration and climate change, languages are endangered. Sophia Smith Galer, author of How to Kill a Language and an award-winning journalist who writes and broadcasts about language, technology and culture, will take a closer look at the complex reasons behind this phenomenon. Sophia warns that half of the world’s 7,000 languages will have disappeared by the end of this century. If the limits of our language mean the limits of our world, how much do we lose when languages die? And what can we do to stop or slow down this process, retaining the richness of cultures, memories, imaginaries and identities that we inhabit through language?
15:45 Performative reading and discussion: “Fear Eats Ali”, Edwin Nasr, Cem Dukkha, mod. Michał Grzegorzek
Fear Eats Ali is a forthcoming novel by Edwin Nasr written in a time and place of fear and loathing, that of Berlin in the aftermath of the October 7 events. It follows the trials and tribulations of Ali, a homosexual Lebanese immigrant, through a city gripped by suspicion and a renewed appetite for punishment. This performative reading returns to the novel’s preoccupation with masculinity, shame, and fantasies of violence. DJ and musician CEM performs a live guitar improvisation that moves between sparse repetition and dissonance. The music lends the text a martial, estranged quality; together, voice and guitar move through the psychic residue of a world organised around grievance and wounded pride.
The reading will be followed by a conversation moderated by Michał Grzegorzek, moving from the novel into a broader discussion of literature and music, practices of reading and listening. It will touch on contemporary Berlin, with its hideouts and traps; on memories translated into fiction; and on friendships forged in the dark.
The performative reading is co-curated by Michał Grzegorzek and presented as part of the exhibition Dirty Pages. Karol Radziszewski and DIK Fagazine at Galeria Studio.
