SANATORIUM MERKURIAL — MORPHINE RAUM / BERLIN

SANATORIUM MERKURIAL — MORPHINE RAUM / BERLIN

Sanatorium Merkurial returns to Morphine Raum in Berlin with a focused programme featuring Katarzyna Karpowicz and su dance110. Their work moves across acoustic instrumentation, electronic transformation, voice, body and spatial experience, reflecting some of the central concerns of Sanatorium Merkurial: ambiguity, transformation and affect.

Sanatorium Merkurial is a collaborative project developed by Sanatorium of Sound, the experimental music festival based in Sokołowsko / Poland, and Merkurial, the artistic collective founded by Robert Piotrowicz and Jacek Sienkiewicz. The programme brings together artists connected to both projects, whose practices emerge from different cultural, musical and geographical contexts. These highly individual artistic practices find common ground in the way they develop their own musical languages and address artistic challenges beyond the dominant narratives of the Western European avant-garde.

One of the central territories explored by Sanatorium Merkurial is the broad and often ambiguous space between contemporary abstract music and traditional music. Tradition is not treated as something to be reconstructed, preserved or simply reinterpreted. Its traces — rhythms, forms, modes of organising sound, cultural memory and individual genealogies — become material for entirely new creative gestures. The project draws attention to the ways in which contemporary abstract practices can carry echoes of different musical traditions without attempting to reproduce them.

Sanatorium Merkurial also places particular emphasis on the affective dimension of abstract music — on its capacity to operate through the body, intensity, tension and the relationship between performer and audience. Through affect, music can move beyond the autonomy of its formal structures and acquire a different presence within social and political space, becoming at once a physical, cultural and social experience.

Katarzyna Karpowicz is a musician and sound artist whose practice develops at the intersection of traditional instruments, electronic transformation and experimental composition. Working with koto and shō, she treats their historically established sonorities not as material to be preserved or reconstructed, but as a starting point for the construction of a highly individual contemporary musical language. Acoustic sound is extended and destabilised through electronics, moving between clarity and distortion, resonance and interference.

Microtonal tensions, detuning and subtle transformations of timbre play a central role in her work. Rather than separating the acoustic source from its electronic processing, Karpowicz creates continuous relationships between them, allowing instrumental identities to become unstable and gradually transformed. Her compositions are marked by precision and restraint, but also by a strong sensual attention to the physical qualities of sound.

Her practice also extends into theatre, performance and visual art, placing musical composition within a broader field of spatial and performative experience. Across these contexts, Karpowicz develops a distinctive approach to the relationship between inherited musical forms and contemporary abstraction, treating tradition as an active material capable of generating new sonic forms rather than as a fixed historical language.

su dance110 is the sonic identity of Berlin-based transdisciplinary artist, composer, and author Dan Su, with roots in Yunnan, China. Su constructs hybrid modular environments as Cognitive Fictions, exploring how embodied knowing emerges and transforms through states of uncertainty. Their practice approaches the body as an active agent in encounters with self-built technological systems.

Their sound unfolds through invented vocal language moving with electronic landscapes of texture, noise, and pulses. Across their live works and recordings, voice and electronics continuously reshape one another through shifting sonic forms informed by bodily gestures, movement, material and spatial resonance, and recursive processes of listening. Each work constitutes its own fictioned micro-world.

Recent releases include Shang Can (2024), the German Record Critics’ Award-winning album Persist (2025), and the forthcoming EP [TFx.0]_5traces, drawn from the spatial audiovisual installation at Su’s 2026 solo exhibition.

At Morphine Raum, Su will test 7-3-A [module EF-], a live iteration of Sonic Mourning.