Can a lovesong start a revolution?

"Lovesong Revolution" is a live lecture-performance that journeys through personal, anecdotal and political events — both recent and distant — that consider the role of (oppressed) sounds and voices in relation to forms of collectivity, dissidence and belonging. Conceived in the aftermath of the Lebanese and Iraqi October Revolutions of 2019 and the subsequent onset of the global pandemic, the work travels from unprecedented events where bodies and sounds erupted in public space, to moments of imposed silence and (violent) dispersal of bodies. Alternating between personal anecdotes, sound recordings and historical archive material, the piece weaves together various sonic fragments that trace some unlikely, and at times forgotten, alliances and active solidarities across vast geographic locations.

Urok Shirhan (NL/Iraq) is an artist, researcher and DJ working with performance, visual arts and critical theory. Her practice explores the politics and poetics of sound, image and speech in relation to power and affect. Informed by her family history of political struggle and migration. 

Her works combine documentary and sonic (auto) fiction to explore the role of sound––and the voice––in the context of collectivity, dissidence and belonging.

Urok holds an MA (Hons.) in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths University in London and a BFA from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her works have been presented widely, and she has been in residence at Delfina Foundation (London); BAK, basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht); NIAS/KNAW (Amsterdam); Jan van Eyck (Maastricht); Ashkal Alwan (Beirut) and most recently at Onassis AiR (Athens). In 2020 and 2021 Urok hosted the monthly live radio show ‘Sound Without Image’ on Radio Alhara,  broadcasting from Bethlehem, Palestine.

The Sonic Acts Biennial 2026, titled Melted for Love, explores the sounds of home. It proposes friendly ways of feeling (at) home, technologies of welcoming, and open-ended invitations to participate in hospitality. With ‘melted for love’ as its guide, it seeks to animate closeness and friendship. Instead of seeing strangers everywhere, it embraces the world as a mesh of souls – human and otherwise – woven together. If home is love – love as a network of family, friendship, kinship, and beyond – this Biennial foregrounds communities that work in solidarity, exchanging exhaustion for tenderness.

Angeliki Tzortzakaki is a Cretan-born, Amsterdam based curator, writer, project coordinator and tutor. Her practice materialises in multiple, often performative ways, and overall looks at narratives that wish to break the nature-culture binary. Since late 2023 Angeliki has been working as exhibitions curator at the Sonic Acts Biennial. Next to that, Angeliki (co-)curated solo exhibitions by AnnaMaria Pinaka ‘She Keeps Them Warm with Her Skirt’ at ROZENSTRAAT in Amsterdam (2025) and by Yorgia Karidi at the RAW Theocharakis Foundation in Athens (2024) ‘Ode to Friendship: a score to speak from’. In 2024, she co-curated the exhibition and performance programme ‘Touching Faultlines’ at the Roman Theatre of Gortyn, in Crete.  Previously, she contributed with a performance programme and editing of the catalogue to the exhibition ‘A Rave Down Below’ for 2023 Eleusis - European Capital of Culture, and in 2022 co-organised the performance series carried by invisible bodies at Sexyland & de Ruimte in Amsterdam. In 2021, Angeliki was Curatorial Fellow at ARTWORKS (Stavros Niarchos Foundation) and previously took part in the nomadic fellowship A Natural Oasis? (2018–20), after which she joined the curatorial team of the 19th Mediterranean Biennial ‘School of Waters’ in San Marino. In 2022/23 she was board member of the Salwa Foundation in Amsterdam.

Angeliki teaches situated writing and curatorial practice at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and St. Joost School of Art & Design. From 2019 to 2022 she was part of the artist-run residency programme bi- and the performance study group Scores for Gardens.