sonic acts biennial 2026: heart rests twice concert 1 // eve aboulkheir, dali de saint paul & imvisage
Thursday, February 12, 2026

Heart Rests Twice is a concert series taking place across five Thursday nights at murmur as part of Sonic Acts Biennial 2026, Melted for Love.

The first edition brings together artists who work with repetition, the voice, and live sound transformation. Rather than presenting fixed compositions, the performances build and reshape sound in real time, allowing voices, rhythms, and textures to evolve within the space. In keeping with the Biennial’s theme, the series opens with a fiery performance – one of flames, risk, and possibility.

Eve Aboulkheir’s Pyro Voices creates music using fire. Alcohol-coated glass vessels are ignited and played live, producing resonant tones that are captured, repeated, and sent back into the room, making the architecture itself part of the performance. Dali de Saint Paul works with the voice as a space for expression and resistance. In a fully improvised set inspired by the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, she layers and alters her voice to move between languages and identities, challenging familiar ideas of meaning and power. Imvisage – the duo of Théo Fernandez and Antoine Alcaraz – explore how repeating sounds can feel both intimate and unstable. Using a minimal setup of light sensors, drum machine, and voice, they build patterns that are constantly adjusted and reshaped, balancing precision with unpredictability.

Across Heart Rests Twice, artists explore ideas of home, place, and belonging through attentive, shared listening. In murmur’s surround sound space in Amsterdam Noord, each concert is followed by a Q&A, opening up conversation around sound, space, and presence.

The Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 takes place from 5 February to 29 March 2026 in Amsterdam, with 80 events across 20 venues, featuring work by 200+ artists. This large-scale arts manifestation includes concerts, listening sessions, a symposium, film screenings, exhibitions, masterclasses, workshops, and site-specific projects.