Sanatorium Merkurial × MORPHINE RAUM

On 24 October 2026, Morphine Raum in Berlin will host the next edition of Sanatorium Merkurial. The programme features Katarzyna Karpowicz and su dance110, whose practices span acoustic instrumentation, electronic transformation, voice, body and spatial experience.

Sanatorium Merkurial is a joint initiative of Sanatorium of Sound, the experimental music festival based in Sokołowsko, Poland, and Merkurial, the collective founded by Robert Piotrowicz and Jacek Sienkiewicz. Organised by the In Situ Contemporary Art Foundation, the project brings together artists connected to both initiatives, whose practices emerge from different cultural, musical and geographical contexts.

These individual practices find common ground in developing their own musical languages beyond the dominant narratives of the Western European avant-garde. One of the project’s central territories is the ambiguous space between contemporary abstract music and tradition. Traces of tradition — rhythms, forms, ways of organising sound, cultural memory and individual genealogies — become material for new creative gestures.

In the work of su dance110 and Katarzyna Karpowicz, these questions take distinctly different forms. The Berlin programme brings their practices into dialogue while preserving their differences.

su dance110

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.

Invented vocal language unfolds through electronic landscapes of texture, noise and pulses. Voice and electronics continuously reshape one another through bodily gestures, movement, material and spatial resonance, and recursive processes of listening. Each work constitutes its own fictioned micro-world.

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

Katarzyna Karpowicz

Katarzyna Karpowicz is a musician and sound artist working at the intersection of traditional instruments, electronic transformation and experimental composition. Working with koto and shō, she approaches their historically established sonorities as starting points for an individual contemporary musical language.

Microtonal tensions, detuning and subtle transformations of timbre play a central role in her work. Acoustic sources and electronic processing form continuous relationships in which instrumental identities gradually transform. Precision and restraint coexist with a sensual attention to the physical qualities of sound.

Her practice also extends into theatre, performance and visual art, placing composition within a broader field of spatial and performative experience.

Organiser: In Situ Contemporary Art Foundation

Partner: MORPHINE RAUM

Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Culture Promotion Fund.