The highly anticipated Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw opened to much fanfare in the last days of October. Ahead of a more complete exhibition that is scheduled to open next February, a selection of artworks from the museum’s collection was displayed. Intended as a preview, this partial presentation was accompanied by over twenty performances by local artists. Show Me the Body, a performance by Polish-born, Berlin-based artist Agata Siniarska, fittingly took place on Halloween, the last day of the museum’s impressive performance program. Using her voice and body, Siniarska transported the audience from the white cube of the museum into a realm of disgust, fear, and horror.

In a dark, empty gallery, the artist laid on the floor on her back, in a contorted and visibly uncomfortable position. She wore a dark grey jumpsuit and boots that were reminiscent of a soldier’s uniform. An outline of her body was marked out with tape, as if she were a victim in an active crime scene. For about five minutes, Siniarska lay completely motionless in this position. She breathed deeply, and every time she exhaled, let out a deep, continuous bellow that rose to a crescendo before ebbing. Siniarska uncannily mimicked the sound of a siren, the kind that warns a citizenry of impending, catastrophic danger – a natural disaster, enemy fire, or an invasion. With each successive howl, the atmosphere in the gallery got tenser. Suddenly, Siniarska stood up and ran to a dark corner of the room. Crouching down, she began to make animalistic sounds, gurgling and growling as if she were a hungry predator. But the most terrifying sound that Siniarska imitated was that of a bomb exploding. She let out a long, airy screech, as if imitating an object that was falling or careening through the air before its devastating annihilation. The artist’s body and movements seemed to be dictated by the sounds she made: her body rose and fell with each sonic expulsion. Siniarska’s astonishingly precise mimicry, while remarkable, made me question why she would reproduce such triggering and traumatic sounds.

The ‘explosions’ were followed by a moment of relative silence in which the artist forced herself to choke, as if the devastating and alarming sounds we heard in her performance thus far were stuck in her throat. Concluding her performance, Siniarska screamed before walking out of the room. But the sound of her scream lingered and filled the room even after she left. Siniarska’s voice broke through her throat, skin, and body, and remained as an ‘after-acoustic’ – a noisy afterimage vibrating in the audience’s ears.

For Siniarska, sound is a natural extension of the body. They are inseparable: one produces the other. To prepare for her performances, Siniarska searches online for recordings of explosions, alarms, and sirens, listening to them repeatedly for hours on end to memorize the nuances of each sound. She then practices and perfects the positioning of her mouth and the breathing rhythms required to accurately replicate the sounds. Siniarska turns sound into her body’s way of ‘moving’ and ‘speaking,’ a form of communication that is extreme, provocative, and even offensive.

It is not difficult to draw a connection between Siniarska’s embodiment of sonic turbulence to the resurgent fascist and totalitarian regimes and the relentless genocides and wars around the world. Other contemporary artists have similarly reacted to these horrific socio-political events using sound and the voice. In 2021, Belarusian artist and activist Jana Shostak performed A Minute of Shouting for Belarus to dispute the controversial re-election of Belarusian president Alexandr Lukashenko in 2020. As part of the Polish Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the Ukrainian artist collective Open Group invited viewers to recreate the sounds of the ongoing war in their home country. In the streets and on social media, the voices and screams of people who oppose the human rights abuses and censorship of oppressive governments are not going away. How can we make our collective shout heard?

Siniarska’s performance can be thought of as part of a raucous and distressing tradition of sonic art that expresses fury. Turning her body into a bomb and a siren, she confronted audiences with a monstrosity that emanated from the human body, a nefarious threat that has always existed within us. The body that she ‘showed’ us through her grievous vocal catharsis was therefore not foreign or unknown, but an alarming mirror to the state of our in/humanity. Danger is a scream.