Szymon Wildstein
Sound art / experimental music / performance
Szymon Wildstein (b. 1988, Clichy, France) is an interdisciplinary artist and co-founder of Atelier Artel, an artist-run initiative based in Poznań, where he curated exhibitions, developed artistic collaborations and contributed to residency-related projects. As an artist, he has participated in international residencies and presented his work through exhibitions, performances and interdisciplinary projects combining sound, visual art, literature and performative practices. He is the author of the ongoing performance cycle Ihsus, the sound releases SSSS, TSSSS and psst, and the artist’s novel The Monastery of Foolish Thinking (2024). He has composed music for theatre performances, radio plays, exhibitions and films.
My artistic practice operates at the intersection of experimental music, sound art, literature, performance, and conceptual art. At the core of my work is the relationship between sound, language and the body as modes of knowledge production that exceed stable narratives — I am interested in listening as an active process of reconstruction, where meaning emerges from absence, repetition, fragmentation and the layering of human, non-human, fictional and archival voices.
Ihsus
Ihsus is an ongoing interdisciplinary performance cycle at the intersection of experimental music, theatre and ritual structures, centred on a fictional figure who never fully appears — a body that has lost its original meaning, yet continues to generate ritual, projection and attempts at revival. Materialized as a medical mannequin, Ihsus embodies the tension between presence and absence, life and imitation, belief and doubt.
Requiem — performative reading (2025), WY Gallery, Łódź
A multigenerational live performance combining electronic composition with a reading of David Einhorn's Requiem (1920), presented in Yiddish and, for the first time, in Polish translation. The work builds an intertextual layering across Mozart's original, Einhorn's literary reinterpretation, its translation, and the music itself — a multi-stranded sonic fabric where historical memory intertwines with contemporary perception.
Pochodzę od ananasa — multilingual radio play (2025), Yiddish Culture Centre, Warsaw
Composed for a multilingual radio play presented at the Yiddish Culture Centre in Warsaw, as part of a festival organised by the POLIN Museum ("The Power of Words: On Jewish Languages"), developed with Natalia Chmielarz and Yiddish scholar Karolina Szymaniak. The musical layer, built from vocal and sound collages, foregrounds multilingualism, fragmentation and the performative nature of language as a space of memory and belonging.
SSSS / TSSSS / psst — sound release cycle (2020–2026)
A cycle of sound releases developing a practice based on sound collage, experimental narration and electroacoustic composition, at the intersection of music, literature and conceptual art. Built from field recordings, processed voices and fragmentary narrative structures, each release functions as an autonomous album and as part of an evolving archive of recurring motifs and characters.
The Monastery of Foolish Thinking — artist's novel (2024)
A debut book project combining literature and conceptual art, now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA). "Wildstein's The Monastery of Foolish Thinking is one of the better artistic texts of recent years" — Adam Mazur, art historian and curator, in the book's afterword.
