Frequencies is an exhibition featuring a group of contemporary artists who explore the dynamic possibilities of sound. These artists attend to the audible and inaudible traces of the world to create works across sculpture, architecture, video, performance, and image. 

Artworks on view foreground the physical, material, embodied, and affective dimensions of sound to amplify hidden histories and imagine possible futures. Some works are attuned to the built and natural environment, while others explore the resonant possibilities of materials like ceramic vessels, modified instruments, and aluminum tapestries. Together, these works invite us to experience sound expansively, beyond what is audible: listening through the body, material, movement, and sensation. 

Artists included are Alluvium, Vivian Caccuri, Sofía Córodva, Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez, Nikita Gale, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Sara Ouhaddou, Adrian Piper, Ana Paula Santana, Naama Tsabar, and Karima Walker.

Frequencies also features Channeling the Ear, a dedicated space for intimate listening experiences featuring a selection of albums by artists and musicians such as AGF, Maryanne Amacher, Jessica Ekomane, Christine Sun Kim, Katalin Ladik, Lime Rickey International, Audra Wolowiec, and selections from the collection of Nothing to Commit Records, a research and publishing platform founded by guest curator Bhavisha Panchia.  

Frequencies is organized by Guest Curator Bhavisha Panchia and MOCA Tucson Curator Alexis Wilkinson.

This exhibition was initiated in collaboration with Julio César Morales. Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Teiger Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, and MOCA Tucson’s Board of Trustees, Ambassador Council, and Members.

In-kind support provided by Brick Box Brewery and The Downtown Clifton.

About the Artists

Alluvium, a collaborative project of Nika Kaiser and Nathan Stickel, uses a combination of composed and improvised video projection, field recordings, and experimental sound. They create performative installations responding to site-specific details within each of their works, drawing ties between the political and the spiritual. Nika Kaiser works with photography, video, sound and installation. Her art practice deploys a meeting of the imaginary and the real to explore ideas of deep time, interspecies connection, anti-capitalism, and future ecologies and is informed by her upbringing in the Sonoran borderlands. Kaiser holds an MFA in Visual Art from the University of Oregon. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she has been the recipient of two Arts Foundation New Works Grants, a Warhol Foundation Grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. She teaches experimental practices in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Arizona. Nathan Stickel is an interdisciplinary creator whose work meets at the intersection of sound and politics. He has contributed to a variety of communal and experimental projects, in the forms of coordination and curation, writing, projection, and music. In addition to Alluvium, he has performed as a member of the hardcore/punk bands Mala Mente and Destruido, touring throughout the US. Nathan is currently a member of the BCC, an experimental hub for communal life in Tucson, Arizona.

Vivian Caccuri is an artist based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For the past fifteen years, Caccuri has been developing installations, performances, drawings, and embroideries that investigate how sound can disorient everyday experiences, inspire new forms of living and modulate power dynamics in society. Caccuri’s artistic practice seeks to highlight the active yet under-recognized aspects of sound. Vivian has participated in shows such as the 32nd and 33rd São Paulo Biennial, the Venice Biennale and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India, and has exhibited works at the New Museum and High Line Art in New York City, Museo JUMEX in Mexico among others.

Sofía Córdova lives and works between her native Puerto Rico and Oakland, CA. Her work considers sci-fi as alternative history, dance music’s liberatory dimensions, climate change and migration, and most recently, revolution—historical and imagined—within the matrix of class, gender, race, late capitalism and its evolving technologies. She works in performance, video, sound, music, installation, photography, and sometimes taxidermy. She is one half of the music duo, XUXA SANTAMARIA. In addition to discrete projects, they collectively score all of her video work. Córdova’s work has been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Tufts University Galleries, the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, SFMOMA, the Arizona State University Museum, the Vincent Price Museum, the Wattis Institute, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (USA), as well as the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (Puerto Rico), Art Hub (Shanghai) and MEWO Kunsthalle (Germany).  The same is part of The Kadist’s and The Whitney Museum’s permanent collections. She has participated in residencies at Eyebeam, NY, Headlands Center for the Arts, Mills College Museum, CA, and the ASU Museum, AZ and composed and choreographed performances for the SF Arts Commission, Merce Cunningham Trust and Soundwave Biennial. She is a recipient of a Fundación Ama Amoedo Grant, a Creative Work Fund Grant and is a 2023 Artadia Awardee.

Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez grew up in Medellín, Colombia; Rotterdam, The Netherlands; and the Ruhr area, Germany. She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she was a master student under Rosemarie Trockel, and earned her Master of Fine Arts in 2005 from the Royal College of Art in London. Her work has been exhibited internationally at renowned institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Shedhalle, Zurich; Triangle France, Marseille; and the Barbican, London. Her works are represented in numerous private and public collections worldwide. She has received multiple awards and grants throughout her career, most recently the grant for artistic research from Kunstfonds Bonn in 2024.

Nikita Gale’s work applies the lens of material culture to consider how authority and identity is negotiated within political, social, and economic systems. Gale’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York); LACE (Los Angeles); Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles); Matthew Marks Gallery (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Rodeo Gallery (London); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Gale’s first European institutional solo exhibition will take place at London’s Chisenhale Gallery in 2022. Gale holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University, earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA, and now lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

For two decades, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork has explored the intersections of sound, installation, performance, and sculpture, crafting a practice that reimagines sonic materiality. Her work frequently draws attention to the ways that the built environment shapes the experience of sound and awareness. Sometimes, she does this by deploying architectures of her own, utilizing vinyl sheeting, acoustic foam, felted blankets, and other kinds of sonically functional materials in structures that maximize particular sonic effects. Other times, these concepts are embedded within materially significant sculptures that warp the experience of sound in their vicinity. Kiyomi Gork’s early background in dance, choreography and experimental music continues to inform her work, in which the discrete roles of performer, audience, and stage fluidly blur and collapse. Feedback systems, the history of sound art and synthesized audio, deep listening and music composition—Kiyomi Gork draws these elements together into an expansive multimodal practice.

Sara Ouhaddou’s dual French-Moroccan culture informs her practice as a continuous dialogue. She strikes a balance between craft and the conventions of contemporary art, aiming to place artistic creation’s forgotten cultural continuities into new perspectives. She works in situ, producing works based on encounters with communities, craftsmen and researchers, while exploring heritage sites and objects. Each of her works is a project of learning, exchange of knowledge and intimate or universal stories. A graduate of the École Olivier De Serres Paris, Ouhaddou’s work has been the subject of several international exhibitions including Hirafen, Ateliers C3T, Tunisie (2023), Moroccan Trilogy, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2021) ; Global resistance, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020) ; Manifesta Biennale, Marseille (2020) ; Our World is burning, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020), Marrakech Biennale, Maroc, (2016). In 2024, she took part in the Gherdeina Biennial and presented a solo exhibition at the MACAAL Museum of Contemporary Art in Marrakech and at the ifa-Galerie Berlin. She has also participated in programmes and residencies including Villa Albertine (2023), IASPIS Stockholm (2021/2022), Art Explora x La Cité Internationale des Arts (2021) and La Cité Internationale des Arts x Daniel et Nina Carasso (2020/2021).

Adrian Piper is a first-generation Conceptual artist who started exhibiting her work internationally at the age of twenty and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969. While continuing to produce and exhibit her artwork internationally, she received a B.A. in Philosophy from CCNY in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard in 1981 under the supervision of John Rawls. She studied Kant and Hegel with Dieter Henrich at the University of Heidelberg in 1977-1978, and taught philosophy fulltime for 30 years with specializations in metaethics and Kant. She was the first tenured woman Professor of acknowledged African descent in the field of philosophy. Her two-volume study in Kantian metaethics, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, integrates desire into reason and standard decision theory into classical predicate logic. Piper introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art and explicit political content into Minimalism. In 2000 she further expanded the vocabulary of Conceptual art to include Vedic philosophical imagery and concepts. She is the recipient of many fellowships and awards in art and philosophy, and her artwork is in many important collections. Her seventh traveling retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in the spring of 2018. Her artwork won the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis 2018 and the Kaiserring Kunstpreis 2021. Adrian has studied and practiced yoga since 1965, and lives and works in Berlin, where she runs the APRA Foundation Berlin.

Ana Paula Santana is an experimental artist based in Guadalajara who works in the fields of sound art, experimental music, interactive art, graphics, ceramics, video and installation. She has been beneficiary of the FONCA Young Creators grant (2016, 2018) and recently obtained the Creators of Peace recognition. Her work has been exhibited at the Zapopan Museum of Art, Oaxaca Museum of Contemporary Art, Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Museo del Chopo, among others; internationally she has exhibited her work in Spain, Switzerland, France, Italy and Germany.

Naama Tsabar’s practice fuses elements from sculpture, music, performance and architecture. Her interactive works expose hidden spaces and systems, reconceive gendered narratives, and shift the viewing experience to one of active participation. Tsabar draws attention to the muted and unseen by propagating sound through space and sculptural form. Between sculpture and instrument, form, and sound, Tsabar’s work lingers on the intimate, sensual, and corporeal potentials within this transitional state. Collaborating with local communities of female-identifying and gender non-conforming performers, Tsabar writes a new feminist and queer history of fluency. Tsabar’s first institutional exhibition in Germany opened at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, in 2024. She has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (as a MATRIX artist in 2022) and the Bass Museum, Miami, FL (2021-22). Additional solo exhibitions and performances have been presented at KinoSaito, Westchester County, NY (2022); the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (2019); Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland (2018); CCA Tel Aviv (2018); the Faena Art Center, Buenos Aires (2018); the Museum of Modern Art and Design, New York (2017-18); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); Prospect New Orleans (2017); High Line Art, New York (2016); MARTE-C, El Salvador (2015); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014); the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2013); and the Herziliya Museum for Contemporary Art, Israel (2006).

Karima Walker is an artist and musician living in Arizona. She works with research, performance, materials, video, and sound to critically position the mythologies, practices, and policies that shape perceptions and relationships to land. A touring musician for the past 10 years, her work has been featured in Pitchfork, NPR, MTV and The New Yorker Radio Hour. She holds certifications in Deep Listening and Rainwater Harvesting and is currently pursuing an MFA in Expanded Arts at Arizona State University.

About the Guest Curator

Bhavisha Panchia is a curator and writer of contemporary art. Her curatorial and written work centres on the social, cultural and ideological signification of sound and music in contemporary culture. With an interest in auditory media’s relationship to geopolitical paradigms, anti/postcolonial discourses and imperial histories, she considers how we can critically listen back to listen forward.  She has curated programs and exhibitions locally and internationally, some of which include Sounding a Black Grammar (New York, 2023), Sounding the Void, Imaging the Orchestra V.1, A4 Arts Foundation (2019), ’32: The Rescore, Sharjah Art Foundation (2019), For the Record, ifa-Galerie Berlin (2018); writing for the eye, writing for the ear, Centre for the Less Good Idea (2018); and Buried in the Mix, MEWO Kunsthalle  (2017). She is the founder of Nothing to Commit Records, a label and publishing platform committed to the production and expansion of knowledge related to contemporary art and sound within and across the global South.  Panchia holds a BA Fine Arts Degree and MA History of Art Degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, an MA in Curatorial Practice from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York, and a PhD in Art History from Rhodes University, Makhanda.

About Nothing to Commit Records

Nothing To Commit Records (NTCR) is a research and publishing platform committed to the production and expansion of knowledge related to contemporary art, writing and music within and across the global South. Founded and under the artistic direction of Bhavisha Panchia, NTCR operates as a platform, record label, and collection. The project is dedicated to working with writers, artists, composers, curators, musicians, programmers and DJs to encourage dialogue and collaborations between practitioners globally. One of the platform’s more direct concerns is dedicated to exploring the social and ideological signification of sound and music to rethink the social, spatial and geopolitical. Its collection of artist-produced records serves to produce an archive for future consideration and exploration.

Dates: February 28 – June 29, 2025

Timings:

Thursday – Saturday: 11am – 6pm
Sunday: 11am – 4pm

Location: Museum of Contemporary Art, 265 South Church Avenue, Tucson, AZ, 85701

Admission:

Adults $7, Students and Seniors $4, Youth Free.

Admission is free on Sundays.

Click here for more information.