Listening is being institutionalised as a curatorial tool. Not as "sound art" occupying its familiar niche within group shows and festival sidebars, but as a method for organising publics without defaulting to the image through voice, broadcast, room acoustics, and protocols of attention. What is emerging across biennials, museums, and broadcast infrastructures is not simply a thematic interest in sound. It is a renegotiation of how institutions address their audiences, and on whose terms.
The theoretical ground for this shift has been accumulating for years. Brandon LaBelle's Sonic Agency (2018) argued that sound's invisible, dispersive, and affective qualities could underpin forms of political resistance that the visual regime cannot accommodate. His subsequent Acoustic Justice (2021) pushed further, proposing acoustics not merely as a property of space but as a social and political arena one in which listening positionalities are formed, and where the capacity to be heard is unevenly distributed. These are not abstract propositions. They are now materialising as institutional infrastructure.
In Berlin, The Listening Biennial (3-7 September 2025, Ballhaus Ost) founded and directed by LaBelle gathered its third edition around the concept of "Third Listening," framing listening as relational capacity rather than sensory intake. Across 25 partner institutions worldwide, the Biennial operated not as a traditional exhibition circuit but as a distributed network of listening situations: installations, intimate gatherings, discursive events, and workshops. In its Berlin iteration, the program included sonic, visual, and performative works presented throughout the Ballhaus Ost building, alongside an informal talk series and evening performances. The emphasis was on communal listening shared time in shared space, structured by attention rather than spectacle. The Biennial then extended into the Listening Academy at daadgalerie (1-4 October 2025), developed in collaboration with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Titled Cacophony Stories and drawing on Anna Tsing's writing on disturbed ecologies and precarious survival, the Academy treated listening as something that can be trained, rehearsed, and debated a set of skills rather than a passive condition.
What distinguishes the current moment is that these practices are no longer confined to artist-run or para-institutional spaces. They are being absorbed into broadcast and festival infrastructures with significantly larger reach. CTM Radio Lab, a long-running collaboration between CTM Festival, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, and ORF, commissions hybrid radio and live performance works that premiere at CTM 2026 (Berlin, 23 January - 1 February 2026) and are subsequently broadcast via Deutschlandfunk Kultur's Klangkunst program in Spring 2026, with additional distribution through ORF platforms in Autumn 2026. The model is significant: it positions the live event and the broadcast not as separate outputs but as two phases of a single work, collapsing the distinction between exhibition and transmission. The listener at home and the audience in the room are addressed by the same piece, under different acoustic and institutional conditions.
Museums, meanwhile, are building dedicated listening architectures. Cooper Hewitt's Art of Noise (13 February - 16 August 2026), organised by SFMOMA, anchors the exhibition experience in a large-scale, handmade audio system by Devon Turnbull. His HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3, installed in the museum's historic Carnegie Library, opened to the public in December 2025 as an advance component of the exhibition. The listening room is programmed daily with curated playlists and activated at scheduled intervals by Turnbull and invited musicians, archivists, and collectors who operate the system live selecting and playing records in real time. Capacity is limited. The room demands duration and stillness. It is, in effect, a curatorial proposition about the conditions under which listening becomes possible within a museum: not as background, not as supplement, but as the primary mode of encounter. The Barbican's Feel the Sound (May-August 2025) pursued a parallel logic at institutional scale, comprising eleven interactive installations across the Centre that invited audiences to engage with sound not only through hearing but through the body, vibration, resonance, tactile sensation.
Even when not explicitly "about sound," major exhibitions are now reaching for acoustic and temporal metaphors to frame visual practice. William Kentridge: Listen to the Echo ran as a coordinated double exhibition in Essen (Museum Folkwang, 4 September 2025 - 18 January 2026) and across three venues in Dresden (from 6 September 2025), marking the artist's 70th birthday with a retrospective organised around the figure of the procession, a form inseparable from rhythm, movement, and collective sound. Barbara London's touring exhibition Seeing Sound, organised by Independent Curators International, explicitly eliminates headphones in favour of communal sonic environments where artworks coexist acoustically, requiring visitors to navigate overlapping sound fields rather than consuming isolated tracks.
What connects these developments is not a shared aesthetic but a shared structural proposition. Listening as method, as infrastructure, as politics is being positioned against the dominance of the visual in how institutions convene and address their publics. The question is no longer whether sound belongs in the museum or the biennial. It is whether the institutions themselves are prepared to reorganise around what listening demands: duration, proximity, shared vulnerability, and the redistribution of who gets to be heard.