24. Juni 2026, 17.00 Uhr Kunstuni Linz, Hauptplatz 8, 4020 Linz (Lecture Hall F - H8.05.03)
The Department of Cultural Studies invites you to a lecture from Brandon LaBelle.
In considering the senses of performance, I’m curious to think through the topic of feeling, and in what ways feeling allows for a form of holistic sensing. Following the work and research emerging as part of The Listening Biennial, a project I’ve been directing since 2021, I’ll share a number of critical and creative perspectives, elaborating feeling as a sensuous capacity or poetic power. Grounded in listening as a gesture of radical hospitality, one that nurtures deeply ethical forms of relationality, poetic power is positioned as what may move us from a dominant system of “production”and toward “receptivity,” from a logic of separation and toward the felt sense, as a sympathetic path of knowing. Taking further guidance from emerging research in the field of biology, this includes a reflection on what I think of as “curatorial affection,” a form of practice that works at holding space for others, and that follows from poetic power, as what figures a loving ear.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including Communities in Movement (2019–2023), Oficina de Autonomia (2017–), The Living School (2014–2016), The Imaginary Republic (2014–2019), Dirty Ear Forum (2013–2022), Surface Tension (2003–2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998–2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010), and Background Noise (2006).
All Date of the lecture series “The Senses in Performance”:
11. März 2026
Introduction by OLFAC – Silke Felber, Freda Fiala and Julia Ostwald
25. März 2026
320 GB im Rucksack – der physische Aspekt digitaler Kunst über Gletscher
Tina Frank (Visual Communication, University of Arts Linz) &
Alexis Dworsky (Media Design, University of Arts Linz)
15. April 2026
Dis_sensual – A crip choreographer’s re-distribution of the sensible
Michael Turinsky (Artist, Vienna)
22. April 2026
Performing Snakes in Modernity and Today
Nicole Haitzinger (Dance Studies, University of Salzburg) &
Christina Gillinger (Tanzquartier Vienna TQW)
29. April 2026
Lingering with Bass (2024, Steve McQueen)
Ulrike Hanstein (VALIE EXPORT Center, University of Arts Linz)
6. Mai 2026
Sinn für Unlösbares
bankleer – Karin Kasböck & Christoph Maria Leitner
13. Mai 2026
Mimi o Sumasu – the Very Act of Listening
Mia Yoshida (Artistic Research and Head of the Zentrum Fokus Forschung, University of Applied Arts Vienna)
20. Mai 2026
Tasting skin. On chilis and chills
Karin Harrasser (Cultural Studies, University of Arts Linz and Director of
ifk – International Research Center for Cultural Studies)
27. Mai 2026
Olfactory Violence and the Freedom to Speak: Stink Bombs in Interwar Europe
William Tullett (Early Modern History, University of York)
3. Juni 2026
Sensing the Atmospheres of Painters’ Studios in Nineteenth-Century France
Erika Wicky (Olfactions, Université Grenoble Alpes)
10. Juni 2026
Hee-Hawing Democracy: Somatic Articulations Beyond the Logos - Inhalt folgt
Bettina Wuttig (University of Marburg)
17. Juni 2026
Greetings from the Swamp
Maria Nalbantova (Artist, Sofia)
24. Juni 2026
A loving ear – toward a poetic ecology of feeling
Brandon LaBelle (Independent Researcher, Berlin)