What if your heartbeat stopped following the rules?
What if time stuttered, blinked, looped, or refused to make sense?
What if rhythm — that thing we trust to keep us grounded — was the very thing unraveling?
Arrhythmia is a space to feel those questions, not answer them.
It’s a celebration (or maybe a gentle disturbance) of rhythms gone rogue.
Inspired by philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, this interdisciplinary exhibition doesn't aim to diagnose what’s broken — it invites to step inside the breakdown. The conceptual foundation is drawn from Lefebvre's notion of arrhythmia—an irregularity in rhythm. While it is a pathological condition of the body, it also echoes as a socio-political state, emerging from the collision of bodily, environmental, and technological forces.
The exhibition treats arrhythmia as a threshold for inquiry, rather than a symptom to be cured.
Seven projects pulse, flicker, fracture, hum — each in their own off-beat way — and are combined with the curated Program of Sound (/)Performances.
Each work explores how humans’ personal, social, and ecological lives are increasingly shaped by arrhythmic forces: the acceleration of technology, the erosion of bodily time, environmental collapse, and the distortion of perception through algorithmic and visual filtering. Each work engages with irregularity as a space of friction, reflection, or potential reorientation.
In Scavenger’s Metronome, Orestis Telemachou & Shao-Chun Hsu present a sculptural duet of semi-organic machines where electronics and flesh-like materials merge. Blood-red LEDs pulse in disruptive sequences, animating alien, prosthetic forms that blur the boundary between organic life and technological detritus.
Tony “Tao” Li’s installation BLU (Blind Lucid Umbrella) immerses the audience in a field of UV blue light—a spectral residue of turn-of-the-century technological optimism. The fixture pulses with latent memories of obsolete futures, glowing digital interfaces, rave culture, the dream of a hyper-connected world, overstimulated nervous systems, fatigue, overexposure, and the sensory overload of post-digital life.
In Niki Danai Chania’s Arrhythmia, a wall installation unfolds the story of M., a monstrous figure navigating an underground world shaped by emotional and social collapse. Rooted in the artist’s semi-fictional writings, the work traces the fragile yet defiant beat of a body—and a world—that refuses to conform. M.’s presence becomes a sacred disturbance, a rhythm forged in the act of enduring.
With Computational Time-Keeping, ULTRA reflects on the relationship between church bells and computational systems as clock masters, exploring the reciprocal relationship of social rhythms and computational time. Everyday routines, civic rhythms, and information loops are increasingly conducted by computational processes. Phones clock heart rates, orchestrating planet-wide morning runs. Rush hour traffic seeps through the city’s arteries, lubricated by smart signals. Computational Time-Keeping is ubiquitous, yet its mechanisms remain obfuscated — hidden inside black boxes, distributed across remote servers, and masked by sleek interfaces. If the automated production of rhythms and time now fundamentally structures life, how can it be made perceptible — and thus open to questioning and reconfiguration? A clue might be found with the devices once used to organise cities via sound: church bells.
Canvaswan’s video essay turns to investigate censorship through the visual language of absences in digital cartography. Rather than censorship as a void, the work treats absence as rhythm: a pattern of disappearance, a site of tension. In revealing these distortions—erased geographies, missing data—canvaswan treats censorship as an active force that governs perception, challenging the idea of media as a neutral transmitter of truth and absence as passive.
In Died of a Broken Heart, Niki Maria Lore (also Niki Pielsticker) offers a sound-based encounter (place finger on sensor) with the rhythms of heartbreak. Drawing on the operatic figure of Mimì from La Bohème, the work reflects on how love and suffering are culturally scripted, repeatedly performed, aestheticized, and increasingly measured. The piece resists closure; the sound lingers in the unresolved state of emotional aftermath. The listener's heart frequency initiates the tension of sound and listening, measurement and emotion — a repetitive echo of endings that never fully arrive.
Finally, Zuzana Pabi’s Grip theory utilizes patterns observed in practices of systemic thinking that define how lived reality is accessed and experienced. Central to the work are designs of wall fixtures that mimic ceremonial objects, repurposed as functional climbing holds. This intervention challenges the imposed symbolic value of these objects by inviting a physical, secular engagement.
Together with the Program of Sound (/)Performances, the works form a landscape of ruptures—an exhibition space attuned to the excesses of rhythm that define contemporary life. Arrhythmia invites visitors to dwell within dissonance. It is in these frictions that new rhythms may emerge.
Erratic and unfamiliar, it isn’t a stable space.
It is full of pauses, pulses, and phantom beats.
