In September 2026, music researchers from the University of Oslo will take over the Nobel Peace Center’s Pop-Up Studio, filling the space with the exhibition SONIC CITIZENSHIP. Today's event serves as a launch for both the exhibition and the ground-breaking book Music of Absence: An Aesthetics of Loss in the New Millennium (EUP, 2026), edited by Christine Dysers, Peter Edwards and Judith Lochhead. Talks and presentations will explore music and sound as a site for critical listening and reflection on themes of citizenship, belonging, and social justice in the 21st century.
Organised by the Prisons of Note research project and the Democracy of Silence research project.
NB: If you would like to attend the reception at 3:30pm, please register here:
https://nettskjema.no/a/649760
Programme:
11:45: Doors open
12-12:45: Curator talk with Áine Mangaoang and Peter Edwards: Prisons of Note and Democracy of Silence. Including lunch and tour of the exhibition.
12:45-13:10: A Field Guide to Silence with Lucy Cathcart Frödén.
13:10-13:45 Kristine Utne Stiberg (aka Kristine Blir Rapper) i samtale med Slekke Wørld: «Vi slutter ikke å rappe når vi sitter inne» (We Don't Stop Rapping When We're Locked Up).
13:45-14:00: Break.
14:00-15:30 Book launch: Music of Absence: An Aesthetics of Loss in the New Millennium (EUP, 2026), with Christine Dysers, Judith Lochhead and Peter Edwards, and including presentations by Payam Pilvar and Kristina Socanski Celik.
15:30-17 Exhibition and book launch reception: register for the reception here: https://nettskjema.no/a/649760
Exhibition in the Pop-Up Studio September 18 – October 15, 2026
Exhibition: Sonic Citizenship
Through a series of short films, music, and images, the Studio is transformed into an immersive, multisensory, audiovisual exhibition and a site for critical listening and reflection on themes of citizenship, belonging, and social justice.
Conceptualized around the notion of sonic citizenship, defined as the communal production of acoustic spaces by those without sustained access to political power (Andrisani 2017), the exhibition explores what happens when spaces for participation are denied. It considers how sound and its constitutive counterpart, silence, can resist alienation, open up new collective potentials, and expose the sonic mechanisms that obstruct or become new possibilities in democratic practice.
All are welcome to visit the Pop-Up Studio at the Nobel Peace Center to tune into some songs, sounds, and stories that mediate community, critical consciousness, and hope.
Entrance to the exhibition is free.
Music of Absence book launch
Music of Absence explores how feelings of absence and loss are woven through twenty-first-century music across a wide range of genres and traditions. Against a backdrop of climate catastrophe, political violence, financial instability, racial injustice, and rapid technological change, the essays examine how music gives form to despondency and grief – yet also opens up space for imagination, reflection, and renewal.
Bringing together diverse musical practices and philosophical perspectives, the book proposes music as an alternative mode of thinking at a moment when our familiar ways of making sense of the world are faltering. Its themed sections trace the many meanings of absence, showing how music not only reflects crisis, but actively shapes new ways of being together and of envisioning more sustainable futures.
About the researchers
The exhibition is curated by Áine Mangaoang, Lucy Cathcart Frödén, Peter Edwards and the research projects Prisons of Note led by Áine Mangaoang, and Democracy of Silence led by Taina Bucher.
Guest speakers include Christine Dysers, Judith Lochhead and Kristine Utne Stiberg (see below).
Key dates:
Exhibition Opening Launch 12:00-17:00, Friday 18 September, 2026
Drop-in all-ages workshop: 12:00-14:00, Saturday 19 September, 2026
See the Ultima Festival webpages about the event.
“The concept of sonic citizenship foregrounds sound and listening Cathcart Frödén, Herrity & Mangaoang, Sound and Detention: Towards Critical Listening, Sonic Citizenship, and Social Justice, 2026: 3. |
Judith Lochhead is Professor of Critical Music Studies at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York. Lochhead’s research focuses on music of the present from analytical, historical, critical and ethnographic perspectives. Lochhead’s recent co-edited book is Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World (Chicago, 2021), with Eduardo Mendieta and Stephen Decatur Smith. Some recent publications include: ‘Émilie du Châtelet, Kaija Saariaho and Heroes of the 21st Century’, in Beate Kutsche and Katherine Butler (eds), The Heroic in Music (Boydell & Brewer, 2022); ‘Multiplicities, Truth, Ethics: A Queering Analysis of Chaya Czernowin’s Anea Crystal’, in Gavin Lee (ed.), Queer Music Theory (OUP, 2023); ‘Timbre Realities: A Phenomenological Study of Liza Lim’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus’, in Jonathan De Souza, Benjamin Steege and Jessica Wiskus (eds), Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music (OUP, 2023); ‘Canonic Machines’, in Jeffrey Swinkin (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Musical Variation (OUP, 2025); and ‘Undisciplined’, SMT Colloquy, Music Theory Spectrum (2023).
Christine Dysers is Assistant Professor in Music at Aalborg University. Her work focuses on music after 1989, with a particular emphasis on contemporary composition. Christine’s research interests include the aesthetics of repetition, the politicality of music and the notion of the uncanny. She has a PhD in Music from City, University of London. Previously, she was affiliated with Columbia University as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar (2021) and with Uppsala University as a postdoctoral fellow (2022–5). Christine is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Perspectives of New Music, Twentieth-Century Music, TEMPO and Musik & Ästhetik, and has contributed to collections across several musicological disciplines. She is the author of Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers: Bernhard Lang (Intellect, 2023).
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Kristine Blir Rapper
As a trained actor from the Danish National School of Performing Arts and Nordic Black Theatre, Kristine Utne Stiberg has, since 2022, developed the artist Kristine Blir Rapper; a trilingual Scandinavian rapper (NO/DA/SE).
With her own dancers and DJ, she writes and produces her own music, music videos, and interactive live shows, constantly pushing the boundaries of the Norwegian music industry and challenging who is “allowed” to do what.
On her album “We Don’t Stop Rapping When We Get Old, We Get Old When We Stop Rapping”, she features Norway’s first rappers over the age of 60. In February, she released the music video “We Don’t Stop Rapping When We’re Locked Up”, featuring male inmates at Ullersmo high-security prison.
Kristine Blir Rapper has performed at venues and festivals including Parkteatret, Tou Scene, Træna, Huset-KBH, and Den Anden Side, and has performed for more than 5,000 young people through Den kulturelle skolesekken (Norway’s national cultural programme for schools). Alongside her music career, she acts in films (including Sentimental Value and Lonely Cowgirl), directs theatre, leads women’s circles through @MÅNESIRKEL, and hosts sauna rituals.
Her artistic practice is about connecting people TO themselves and to one another — through the body, sound, and boundary-pushing outfits.
