Sanatorium Merkurial

Sanatorium Merkurial returns to Morphine Raum in Berlin with a focused programme featuring Katarzyna Karpowicz and su dance110. Their distinct practices meet within some of the central concerns of Sanatorium Merkurial: ambiguity, transformation and affect.

Sanatorium Merkurial is a collaborative project developed by Sanatorium of Sound and Merkurial, bringing together highly individual artistic practices emerging from different musical and cultural contexts. Rather than proposing a unified aesthetic position, the project focuses on artists who develop their own musical languages beyond the dominant narratives of the Western European avant-garde. It is particularly interested in practices where tradition is approached not as something to be reconstructed or preserved, but as material capable of generating new forms, and in the affective dimension of abstract music — its capacity to operate through the body, intensity and tension.

In the work of Karpowicz and su dance110, these questions take distinctly different forms, bringing two individual practices into dialogue without reducing their differences to a shared aesthetic language.

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.

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.

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